My New Skin

26 min read

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electricjonny's avatar
By
electricjonny
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Update

Based on some feedback, I spaced out the journal a bit and darkened the text so as to not be so straining on the eye, and used a slightly different background image for the text with a bit more than just noise in it.  I also made the menu images slide instead of spin which is a bit less annoying :slow:  And I've noticed there's really no :hover kind of thing on mobile browsers :o  Or maybe I'm not used to phones and don't know what the equivelent is there.  Anyway, I might try to see if I can make the menu click activated, but really I don't even think it gets used at all, so who knows.  I'll play with it more later.

Changes & Shit

So I decided to redo my journal skin.  I'm much more a fan of dark skins and only made the other one lighter to blend in with all the other things on the page.  But I figured change is good (at least some times) and I wanted to start something new here, what with my life being a bit different now.  I plan to post more on that later, but first a new skin.

The skin is basically the same as my old one, just with some color changes.  But now I've added a share menu.  I've never been the biggest fan of idiot-proof share buttons plastered all over the internet and I block them—even this journal's share buttons—with uBlock Origin.  But it seems that the world loves its easy one-click sharing of shit, so might as well join the party, eh?  Mostly though, it was just fun to make and it provides a bit of flash to an otherwise boring skin (journals are for text, not flash).

Anywho, I'm sure I'll change the colors around slightly, but I think I have it mostly where I like it.  I'd love to get the menu to transition a bit more with fading or sliding menu windows, but I haven't spent much time on that yet.  And I still have to clean up the CSS and remove a ton of old stuff from my last skin.  Oh, and while I was making this skin, I also made a Greasemonkey script to simply add a button to the right of the zoom button up above when you're writing a journal.  Clicking it selects this skin and fills in all the HTML required to make it show right and also adds in the share links, since they change with each journal (here's hoping I got the right journal ID and it links to the right page :B)  So all in all, I had a fun time doing it.

For any of you journal skin creators or design people, I'd love to hear some ideas on what you'd change or how to improve it :)



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Comments7
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rotane's avatar
rotane
Edited
I like a proper dark skin. Always have, always will. This one is a bit too extreme for my taste, if i may say so. What do i mean? Simple: the contrast is a bit too high. While it's better for readability, it's still a strain on the eyes. Either tone down the text-colour or brighten up the background a bit – i'd prefer the latter. It's the same problem i have with sites such as Steam or Letterboxd: once i've read a few paragraphs, i can see the "echo" of the lines burned in my retinas when i close my eyes.

Also, since you more or less only inverted your previous skin, don't forget to add additional whitespace around all our elements. A dark skin needs more space, compared to a light skin, otherwise it feels cramped. Like, the news-div could use a few more pixels of extra padding and margin.

Oh, and one more thing: don't use that grey border around it. A grey border around a dark background colour has no effect other than making it blurry. And there's no need for that.

Otherwise: yay for dark! :thumbsup: