Oh, thank you Setissma: how to avoid having your f-list think thoughts of black death at you.

[icarus]

Setissma gives advice on how to not drive your flist and community members crazy with your aqua fonts and not-so-cool-as-you-think custom layouts.

I admit, when I see a community post in a fancy font with pretty, pretty colors, I automatically don't read it. It's the skim signal.

I'm biased. I assume whoever wrote it is a fool, or else very, very young. I assume (probably incorrectly) that their stories are equally immature.

When I go to someone's LJ and their custom layout is unreadable, I will assume they just don't know what they're doing. This doesn't surprise me because I can't do custom layouts. It's easy for me to imagine incompetence in this arena. Most of the time if ?style=mine or ?format=light doesn't work, I just Back-button but every now and then I'll leave a comment to say "Hello. You may not realize this but yellow in a 4 pt font is hard to read. You might want to fix that."

Most people have been nice about it, though I've never seen the layout change, largely because I never go back.

Comments

[saltroseortopaz.livejournal.com]

Unreadable layouts drive me NUTS. ?style=mine is a GODSEND (especially when RPing -- long-ass threads on ANY layout? ohgod ._. maddening), but I always wonder how some people read their own flists.

Although I have been known to post ridiculousness to my own journal with absurd HTML (I'm particularly fond of the blinking, bright blue, huge marquee about not fucking daleks), and so should probably stfu >_>

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Selective blindness. It's the only way to deal.

That and style=mine. Though I hate having to type it because it's work and it's unnecessary work to boot.

Life is hard.

[saltroseortopaz.livejournal.com]

I don't mind so much if it's like...you know, a pretty readable layout and I'm just putting it in simple comment pages so it'll load a little faster and make for ease of commenting or something. But if I have to do that just so I can see wtf is going on, it's irritating.

[chasethecat.livejournal.com]

Do you use Firefox? If you put a bookmark button on the toolbar with the following you can just click it. *adores her ?style=mine button*

javascript:if(location.hostname.indexOf('livejournal.com')%20>=%200){location.search+=(location.search?'&':'?')+'style=mine';}

[wenelda.livejournal.com]

i'm glad i always disable the customised comments page. sure, i like my layout, but my computer is weird and i know it doesn't look the same on anyone else's, unless they too have a dell inspiron with the same size monitor and everything.

[lexstar29.livejournal.com]

This made me laugh, I do agree. Though my personal peeve is the journals with grey text on a white background. My vision is far from 20/20, I give myself a headache not a paragraph in trying to read it. I'm sure I miss out on some good stuff for that reason!

[teaphile.livejournal.com]

I hate it when people code coloured text into their posts. I read light on dark, so if a post comes up on my flist in dark blue or purple (and once recently in black, for some unfathomable reason) I can't read it at all.

For everything else I have a style=mine button on my bookmarks bar.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Ha. The disappearing text. That must look really weird.

[starrylizard.livejournal.com]

Oh, me too! I have that crazy-font = skip mentality completely built in.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

It's amazingly easy to hit that Back button.

[daneffew.livejournal.com]

I totally agree about the background. People just want to get fancy and make it look oh so pretty and it comes off looking really cheap.

Red on Black gives me a headache. This might be something the originator absolutely loves but sweety you're not the one that wants to read it all the time.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Red and black? That wins the ugly award.

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

yup. i have back buttoned out of highly rec'd stories that i really wanted to read because they were in white or yellow type on a chocolate brown or black background. cannot do that. i have gone to the extreme of reading it highlighted, but shit. it should be readable! easy to see!

am i just old and cranky now or what.....

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

The most remarkable combination I've seen is bright yellow text on a dark blue background. Zap colors is my friend.

I already turn the font size up to Billboard. I don't understand people using tiny fonts.