branchandroot | Oh sweet fuck, tell me this is a joke

Entry tags:

design: ao3: argh

Oh sweet fuck, tell me this is a joke

*looking at the "new and improved" archive skin in horror*

Gray! The background is GRAY!

And the "this is one of your own things" background is PINK!

*horrified beyond words*

ETA: A Quick Fix Skin I ran up is available here until it actually goes public.

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*weeps in horror* *clings*

I'm having to start from the ground up with my neat, tidy white background/black text/sans-serif font. FROM THE GROUND UP. Oh, God.

I'm very excited about the fact that I will, eventually, be able to create a mobile stylesheet. That's fantastic. But. URK. OH GOD.

ALSO ARE YOU KIDDING ME. ALL THAT SHIT ABOUT HOW WE WON'T HAVE TO USE !IMPORTANT ANYMORE. AND WHAT HAPPENS. I HAVE TO USE !IMPORTANT TO GET MY FONT FACE TO SHOW UP. OTHERWISE I AM LEFT WITH HALF SERIF AND HALF SANS-SERIF *FROTHS AT MOUTH*

Er, sorry about the caps, but I am so pissed about that I can't even tell you. The entire reason I came up with a custom skin was to get rid of serif fonts. And then I tried putting sans-serif fonts in and WHAT. WHAT.

Oh my god, I know! I've already had to use important twice! For fuck's sake, this is just a mess, and clearly still shot through with "oh, no, that's a /different/ class than all this other stuff, for no clear reason".

*pets you soothingly* I so totally hear you. I'm just trying to make something readable, myself.

And I'm grateful that you are. I look forward to having something that makes the stories on the archive readable again. I'm usually pretty indifferent to layout -- one reason, no doubt, that I've never learned how to fix it for myself -- but this is really grisly.

I don't suppose skins will do anything to fix whatever the hell they've done to navigation? Which looks just as dysfunctional as ever, but is now unpleasantly in your face about it?

*wry* Depends on which part of the navigation is getting on your soul. A skin won't do a whole lot for the dashboard sidebar, but the buttons something might be done about.

Or is it the page nav, which is supposed to be at the bottom of the page, and (thanks the someone's lack of testing and bright idea to use float in just the wrong way) is currently living scrunched underneath the filters? I can do something about that, though it's a bit counter-intuitive.

Part of it's the page nav. But I just went to look again, and found to my considerable discomfort that my lack of knowledge about this stuff is so thoroughgoing that I can't even tell you what's bothering me about the new layout. I'm vividly aware that I'm not comfortable with it, and that applying the skin that supposedly makes it look the way it did before the upgrade doesn't fix whatever it is that's making me uncomfortable. But beyond that? I've got nothing, beyond a nonspecific sense that everything is simultaneously too crowded and too in my face. All the metadata stuff -- headers, navigation boxes -- are huge and unavoidable and in the way, while the text is laid out in ways that exaggerate the problems with the last system. Lines that go on forever, across the entire width of one's screen; maybe some change in whatever the default typeface was; I don't know. All I know is that I always had the feeling layout could be better, from the perspective of pure readability, but it wasn't so bad I was twitchy whenever I tried to look at a story.

And now I am. And whatever it is that's getting on my nerves, switching to some other public skin doesn't seem to fix it. I feel a little like a patient who comes in to see a doctor complaining of pain, but is unable to say whether the pain is in her foot or her head, let alone whether it's a stabbing or a throbbing kind of pain. Not being able to answer that kind of question makes a diagnosis difficult, and a fix even more so, but I can't help it. I don't know what's wrong! I just know I want it to stop.

Hmmm. Well, the quick fix skin I'm working on does give more elbow room to most all the elements, so that may help. And I up the size of the story font, which was made smaller with this release and that undoubtedly isn't helping you.

I'll see how fast I can get my modular skin hammered out too. That one's got godawful messy code, because half of it only applies to the old html, but as long as I can make the bugger work I don't care. That one has a dark background and puts all the blurbs and stories in light boxes, which I find makes reading a lot easier.

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