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Least Favorite Skin Trends


Morrigan
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On 1/26/2016 at 10:53 AM, Zozma said:

And I know DF is guilty of this but I don't like asymmetry so when people use the grid forum style but don't try to even everything out neatly, it comes across as messy and unfinished to me.

 

So I just got this to be a little closer. Per category they are all the same height. >_> I feel accomplished.

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Profile set made by myself and original Artwork by Fae Merriman, my daughter.

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

I think Skins that don't match the mood of a site, at all, kind of feel out of place.

 

Oh, you have a site based on horror and dark spoopy things happening....why is your skin baby blue and pink? It doesn't... no. That doesn't match.

 

Or the random Harry Potter site that has images and things that are not related to Harry Potter in any way, shape or form. Random pictures of English countryside... of London, but nothing to indicate it's a harry potter era site.

 

Or Pokemon with random real life people, when the RP itself, does not use real people.

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Well, it technically isn't to do with skin, but I guess still design wise.

 

When forums name their categories as all these weird riddles or phrases vaguely pertaining to what's in. For example, 'Rules' is named 'And the King decrees', 'Advertisements' is named 'Read all about it', etc. I suppose it's alright if the correlating headings are straightforward enough, but sometimes they are so obscurely named that it's tedious to navigate.

 

EDIT: Bias mainly due to being unable to find advertisements board doing advertising sprees. xD!

Edited by Honorem
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That would be a good confessions topic "annoying trends" because I never liked the virgins/whores for advertisement forums.

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Profile set made by myself and original Artwork by Fae Merriman, my daughter.

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

My least favorite skinning trend is having forums where the boards are arranged into two or more vertical columns, especially if the categories aren't marked indicating what 'setting' these boards are in. How in the world do you navigate through that?? x.x

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My least favourite skin trend is hover -everything- like.. some hovers are shiney and spiffy...but not everything needs to be hover

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Anything that impedes the usability of the board for aesthetics. No matter how pretty you think something is, it does me no good if I can't actually read or use it.

 

 

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If it isn't mobile friendly, I ain't got time. So many people either only browse from a phone or tablet, or mostly do so. Refusing to get a new skin for your cms/forum/whatever because your old one looks pretty is only cutting your own nose off.

 

Sadly, I'm still working on fixing this for my own site because Nova doesn't have native mobile support yet (Nova 3 is coming), and I only recently found a skin developer that's had some success beating it into mobile submission. I'm actively styling one of her skins to match my game's branding, though it's available for my players to use as I'm finishing it up.

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"It is human nature to yearn to be what we were never intended for. It is singular, but it is so." -Mark Twain

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  • 2 weeks later...

I absolutely hate when someone has a black background yet their text is a dark gray color. I don't want to have to lean in close to the screen in order to read it.

On the same note I hate when it's a white background and light gray writing.

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So for some really obvious ones I don't like to see...

- tiny fonts

I've seen this a number of times but they're often just difficult to read. Yeah I get it looks neat or whatever but if people have a hard time reading then you've defeated the purpose of having a site based around reading.

 

- messing with the letter spacing/line height.

No. Leave these two alone. Nothing good ever comes from altering them. Cramming your words into a tiny, nigh illegible, block does no one any favours. If your text looks like one big run on word... you have failed as a designer/writer.

 

- pictures as category descriptions.

Cool, you have an image for the forum description... But if that's the only thing there then in many cases it really doesn't tell anyone much. Like if there is just a picture of a field then does that mean all fields? one specific field? A farm? Several farms? Any open place? Any rural area? Can we get some more info about what's around there? 

 

Plus it just adds to the load time of the site. Granted high speed internet is much more common than it used to be so this is less of an issue now. (Though still, there are grades of high speed internet and offhand the average speed in the USA is 8 megabits of download speed. Or about 1 megabyte per second. ) But that doesn't mean make sites larger and use more bandwidth just because internet speeds are higher. Strive to keep file sizes low because a snappy/quick loading website means people are more likely to browse around. (Plus if you have bandwidth limits to worry about then it means your bandwidth lasts longer and more people can visit. I mean 1 megabyte per page load doesn't sound that bad... right? but if you have 5 gigabyte of bandwidth*... that's five thousand page loads for the month. Now if you have 500 kilobytes for the page then suddenly you have 10,000 page loads for that month.)

 

*Most hosts give at least 5 gigabytes for their smallest packages anyway. (Many have over 20 gigabytes.) I'm just using this for an easy number for a really small webhost.

 

+1 to the lack of contrast.

Basic design principles here people... don't go black background and then dark grey text on it. 

Edited by VirusZero
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"There are three sides to every story... Your side, their side, and then somewhere in the middle is the truth."
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I do have to quibble about the line height and spacing thing. Most people use it to squish text together, and that's horrific for readability, but going the opposite direction, adding a little space between letters or between lines can save a font that's otherwise hard to read. For example, I picked some Google Web Fonts for my new site skin that looked somewhat like the fonts actually used in star trek for their LCARS system. The problem is they use a condensed font, which is hard to read in larger blocks of text. It's really hard to make a good condensed font, and one of the frequent crimes is their kerning (the professional term for font spacing) is way too tight, but by bumping up the spacing between letters just a little using css, I now have a font that looks right and is legible.

 

Another two notes on the topic of Internet speeds, load times, and bandwidth:

 

Research is showing that a majority of people do most, if not all, of their web surfing via a mobile device (phone, tablet, eReader), and while some of these people are on  wifi when they do so, a lot of them are on mobile data. Which depending on their coverage and if they're in a building, can vary widely on speed, and are subject to the data caps mentioned by VirusZero.

 

In the US specifically, the way the government rates Internet speeds and saturation is wildly inaccurate. They take the ability to serve one customer in a zip code and what speed they're given, as an accurate account for the whole zip code. There are areas with no service that are considered covered by this standard, there are areas that are rated at higher speeds than the average person actually gets. So it is not a given that broadband is actually at a real saturation of the market. Design with this is mind. Please.

Edited by Death Kitten

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"It is human nature to yearn to be what we were never intended for. It is singular, but it is so." -Mark Twain

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A little bit in the opposite direction can be beneficial, true... But at the same time there's also the point where it's too much. So in general most people should just leave the line height/spacing alone. 

 

The bandwidth caps I was talking about was for the hosting side. As in when you buy hosting for websites they often give you a set amount of bandwidth to use for your site. Granted this doesn't apply so much to free forum hosts like JFH... But aspects of the argument still hold true regardless. (Just because you can use a 2 megabyte jpeg for your background doesn't mean you should.)

 

But mobile phones do have their own bandwidth caps too and they're typically very low (ridiculously low really) which means it's stupidly easy for people to burn through them. (An hour of SD Netflix is like 1GB of bandwidth. HD Netflix is like 3GB for an hour's content.) And websites that eat a megabyte at a load can definitely put a user over their limit in a hurry. (And after the limit bandwidth costs get bonkers.)

"There are three sides to every story... Your side, their side, and then somewhere in the middle is the truth."
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  • 4 weeks later...

I personally hate hovers. I commonly check out sites i'm considering joining on my phone, and I can't really hover over anything on my phone. Also I really hate when people put light text on a light back ground or the other way around. It just makes everything a pain to read. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

any design that makes it impossible to read things.

 

i'm practically blind and I can't read tiny font easily. i hate sites with tiny, illegible font and terrible choices in coloring. it kills me softly.

 

i far prefer lighter color schemes as well with one or two colors; too many can get me overstimulated and confused fast. i skin my sites in monochrome muted colors for accessibility reasons >.>.

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I don't like CRAZY light skins with teeny tiny fonts and overloads of information everywhere: on the banner, in the side bars, in the forum descriptions, etc.

Because apparently I am an old man.

I sort of described my site's current skin but I'm biased sooo... :P

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