[Black Wolf]

I'd vote no, simply because it feels like a slow creep away from HLP's rather nice minimalistic look. Slippery Slope is normally a bad argument, and I doubt that this would end with animated avatars and image sigs for everyone, but, once you get it out of the UEF/GTVA divide that this seems to be meant for in the BP forum, it certainly might get used in unintended ways in other subforums.

If the BP crew want something like this for interested forumites, maybe just encourage people to add their allegiance to the first line of their or two of their sig? If there's some kind of specific colour scheme or whatever it would be distinctive and visible enough to have the same effect within the existing structure of the forum.

As for the coloured subforums, I always used to like them, personally, but perhaps we have slightly outgrown them.

[General Battuta]

I agree on general terms, though I think if anything HLP is pretty garish and needs a trim down. That Team Liquid setup is pretty slick, though.