I know well that Fantendo has a tendency to criticize the changes Wikia has made in regards to its designs. I am also guilty in rudely bashing Wikia's changes at times, though they have also made a variety of... alright design and utility choices, such as forcing the "New Wiki Look" Oasis onto all users by removing the outdated-Monobook skin and choosing to completely ignore the existence of the skin designated as it's successor, Vector, since it became the default for all MediaWiki sites, barring Wikia, in 2010.
Recently I sent an email to Wikia, in an effort to try and get them to recognize issues that I've had with some of their more-recent changes. The email detailed issues I had with the videos embedded automatically on some articles (this does not effect this wiki specifically, but others I go on), the design of the Wiki Chat module (in particular the inability to see all of the users currently in chat, which I've seen complaints about before), and the new masthead(?) that hid the search bar behind a clickable icon... that for some reason doesn't show up for me unless I zoom out to like 80%.
I actually got a response to this email the other day, and I did get all of my complaints acknowledged (which honestly did surprise me). The part I'm sure you guys are most interested in will likely be the design of the chat module, so I'll only quote that response now:
But when it came to my complaints about the search bar, they provided fixes, treating this like a bug, and I'll be sending them an email shortly in response to the fact that I really don't think my issues with it are bugs.
And then I decided: why don't we try and provide alternative versions of the masthead, and try and improve it in ways that will make sense according to us - people who use the site on a regular, near-daily basis. I'll be linking this blog post in the email I am going to send them, and since this is one of the more prominent, and recent, issues that have been plaguing us, and they've shown to actually respond to emails that their users send, this is a good time to try and get them to address issues with it.
I've designed two potential redesigns of the masthead:
(Click to enlarge these images)
The first utilizes both the dark-aqua "FANDOM" banner and the dark grey utilities bar that appears when you're on articles and combines them into one, admittedly fairly clunky, design, while the second combines the two into a single bar. I'm not really sure where an edit button could factor into these designs, though there is still room to the right of an article's main header, and an edit button could be placed there alongside the Comments and Share buttons. In the second, and the first, I imagine hovering over the ellipsis button would create a drop-down below it showing more utility options, such as those I've removed.
I'd like to know what people think about my redesigns, or just about how you'd redesign the banner as well.
Please share feedback!