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Least Favorite Skin Trends


Morrigan
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Super tiny, blurry text and unreadable fonts.  I specifically remember one time visiting a site that had GLOW on all of their text.  Not just the big headers or anything like that, just ... everything!  Also the giant banners that are so tall they take up your entire monitor and you have to scroll down to get to any of the important information.  It just feels really overwhelming to me!

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  • 3 weeks later...

To everyone who's said super-tiny font THANK. YOU! I'd wondered for so long if I was alone in hating it. I wear these thick glasses and literally turn into Velma from Scooby Doo without them. If I have to zoom in to read your forum's text with my glasses on, then there's a problem.

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-Tiny font and/or low contrast absolutely kill me. I too, have super thick glasses and I get some pretty nasty migraines if I'm straining to read text. That goes for neon colors as well, neon yellow/pink are hell on the eyes and I've seen skins that use those colors everywhere before. Also those super fancy cursive fonts. I can barely read cursive on a good day with my vision and you expect me to read it in every post and heading and board description? Nah.

 

-Custom cursors. I don't care if they're "cute" if they're tiny or too large and completely different than the default cursor of my computer, it's an automatic pass.. The crosshair cursor also really irks me because if you mouse over anything with it the contrast and the way that thing changes to match it makes it nearly invisible.

 

-Sites that make me scroll horizontally... On a 4k monitor. Or on my tiny 1080p laptop screen.

 

-Cboxes/sidebars that extend over the main board to make things unreadable. It's so easily solvable, too, Often just adding a margin to one side of whatever the main board is in.

 

-Gifs everywhere. Gifs on every little post and every banner and every forum desciption. Also sites that -require- gifs. Eugh. I don't mind if the gifs are on a member's template or whatever, but they don't need to be all over the site's skin.

 

-I have mixed feelings about column/side by side boards. If done well they're nice and easy to navigate and make me scroll less. If not they're clunky and frustrating. I'm slowly attempting to rework the ones on my own site for that reason, actually.

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Tiny text. As I've gotten older, I swear text has gotten smaller. I still have this issue myself, though, cause sometimes it ~is aesthetically pleasing to be small... but I hate having to lean in to make sure I'm reading something correctly. 

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Jumping on the tiny font bandwagon, because stop;

Low contrast font - the worst I found was light blue on slightly darker blue - on a site sold to me as 'visually impaired friendly';

Anything that flashes, moves or 'blinks' all over the site;

Overly busy skins - I like clean, get creative with your banner, that's cool, but the entire site doesn't need to have so much visual information I can barely focus on reading;

Fancy unreadable font.

 

There's probably more, because I'm a picky butt, but these are the worst offenders.

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Shady McShaderson

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Seriously all you guys bitching about tiny fonts are my people.

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— hover banners for navigation. i'm on mobile a lot, and it's pretty much impossible to use them if i'm not at my computer... carousel banners are a little better, but not by much.

— embedding a discord in lieu of a chatbox on the sidebar. i love discord, but i prefer either a link to it or a traditional forum cbox; the way the default discord thing looks usually contrasts with whatever color scheme the site has, and just detracts from the overall ~ viewing experience ~, if that makes any sense? 

— pop-up cboxes. i don't think i have a specific reason why these bother me, they just... do, for some reason :0

— dittoing everybody on teeny-tiny text! although, i don't like huge text either. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

- No borders. Just white pages with floating avatars and posts and nothing to separate all the different sections of a page.

- Simplistic crap, like plain white background with black text. Might have a fancy header or text, but the rest is just minimal. I get it because this kind of design is in vogue pretty much everywhere, but it's so damn boring. I miss more interesting designs from decades past.

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Cluttered forums (where I need two back to back cappuccinos to find my way around), huge/obnoxious/flashy signatures that take away from the actual writing which is what most role-players are there for, psychedelic GIFs in lieu of avatars, just to nae a few. Skins that are so overly saturated with images that they take forever to load even after they have been cached. Hard to read text, whether it be on the account of size or type.

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Tiny text. I don't even wear glasses, but I'm a graphic designer and this trend should have died 20 years ago. Yeah. I'm old.

All the ads! Things that scroll or too many banner images and I just want to cry. It's cool to allow people to become affiliates and advertise, but put it all on the bottom or somewhere that's not going to assault my senses.

Too much coding. Fancy HTML/CSS stuff is beautiful—I'm a web/graphic designer and I love all the fun things you can do on the web—BUT too much of it doesn't make your site that much more awesome. I'm often checking posts on my phone (sometimes replying, too) and if I can't read your post at all or if I can't even get to my notifications, I'm a sad panda.

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Allll the light colored backgrounds KILL THE EYEBALLS! Then you add pastel colors and cursive writing and I have absolutely no interest in the game.  Can't handle all caps, max gifs, animated falling stuffs (like hearts, snowflakes, ect).

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bright sites. I don't mind whites in general however, I prefer that if it covers a large space to be instead slightly grey or toned. When bright white is paired with other bright colors, like semi-neon ones I'm out of there fast.

in the same sense 'rainbow sites' where there seems to be no color scheme, and elements clash significantly with the skin and other colors.

tiny fonts, and also differing fonts for every little element.

c box that overlays the forum, and other click/hover popups, the bigger they are, the more information they hide, the more I hate them.

certain styles of board/thread boxes, I can't point out many examples specifically but it's a combination of highly visible lines between threads, and the scaling of text/info/images within the boxes.

a nav bar that is not at the very top of a site, example, being below the header image, or to one side,

info side bars on both sides of a forum, squishing all the boards and posts into a tiny space in the middle.

non scrolling elements aside from the nav bar(if it's small) and the background skin

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I don't like this weird trend of having headers/banners that are basically splash pages. Even with a button to "take me down to the site," they're annoying af to deal with just advertising. Not sure how members on such sites deal with it.

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Reality is an illusion. 


 
 

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On 2/5/2016 at 6:52 AM, Rune said:

Oh, I thought of another one.

 

Weird emphasis on the staff. Like, their entire header is dedicated to THESE ARE THE STAFF or a massive chunk of the sidebar is the same. Sure, give us a section in the header or a section in the sidebar, but there's no reason why you should take up space that could be utilized for information (like WTF your site is about) and is, is, instead, names and no indication of who the play/what they do/who they are beyond "Sue" or what have you.

Y I K E S

 

This is my biggest peeve atm. Makes them look so self-centered, like giving off an insta-vibe of "we're cliquey" in my opinion. Where are the lil popup modals that incorporate all staff in just one popup...

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