Tony Poor

iCandy was the first of two skins that I developed for a forum that I ran in late middle school and early high school, which peaked at a couple of thousand members and several hundred posts a day.

The color scheme, though a bit monochromatic, was incredibly well-received by the forum’s community, and decorative visual design elements – the kind that I no longer often rely on for design – provided a technological flair, fitting the forum’s personality. This was a bit of a hobbyist design: no effort was made to unify the site’s branding or personality with the other skin, and more effort was put into having fun with the visual design and providing a fresh aesthetic option for the userbase.

As an aside, this was my first major site. Thus, it served as a training ground in both visual design and interactive, social communities. Years down the road, I can still apply lessons in social computing from this old side project and the successes and failures I had with it. Beats reading a book on the “social web” (or whatever they call it now), right?