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sᴛᴏʀᴍʏ ([personal profile] stormy) wrote in [site community profile] dw_styles2010-09-17 08:43 am
Entry tags:

Layout Layers!

Good morning, Styles team!

At 7am, I had an epiphany. The largest complaint we hear at Dreamwidth is that we don't have enough good layouts. Well, we've had much less time to create our layouts than the competition, but that's not the issue; The problem is that not enough people have come forward to say what they want and how they want it placed. It's not even a matter of colors or design as much as where elements are on the page that people can't seem to get around. Colors and customization are easy, but positioning the elements fluidly so that they'll work for multiple users, and appear roughly the same on any monitor is very difficult. It's an even larger task to do this so that you can support some of the customization options on Dreamwidth - how many columns, where to place the metadata, etc.

I can make something look pretty, but positioning the elements fluidly so that they'll work for most people and still look the same is very difficult for me personally. It's why I don't submit things to styles (especially since I'm a fixed width girl), not that I wouldn't like to help elsewhere.

Might I suggest an entry or community for user submitted "paint layers"?

Users could create their ideal layout designs in paint with simple blocks of color and submit them in .png or .jpg format, hosted on their own servers, for designers to pick up and attempt to make a layout layer code that could meet all the demands of Dreamwidth's customization. Very similar to the way Tabula Rasa's fully customizable layout is - but with elements already positioned. Sort of a way to skin or color the elements are you please, but place them in a way that users will be able to actually use. It's such a simple design concept that any user with a paint type program could submit one, and you might start noticing something similar between multiple submissions that people want to see, but we haven't been able to give them yet.

Here's an example of a paint layout I would love to see (layout elements are not to scale):



And another example:



The idea seems feasible, but where to put it is my question. I could barely decide where to post this entry, let alone a slew of design related requests.
gypsy: (dw: bee-lieve)

[personal profile] gypsy 2010-09-18 01:44 am (UTC)(link)
That would be fantastic if someone could replicate it (or make one close to it)! Icons are not displayed, which is how I prefer it. I wouldn't mind it being officially available, although the images (the dancing girl and the dragonflies) are really unique to me and I'd like to keep it that way.

I'd love it if you (and/or others) want to try to do it =)