getting_started | Layout help for the utterly clueless?

There was a brilliant tutorial on it, but I can't find the link right now.

In the meantime, Zvi explains styles, and

style_system may be able to help.

This Support request also covers it.

Here's an awesome Tutorial to Adding LJ Layouts to DW. There are pictures! :D :D :D
I'm not that coding-literate either, but thanks to the pictorial instructions I was able to make a gorgeous LJ layout work on DW. ♥

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was the one I was thinking of.

Okay, that's still ... scary-looking to me, but I'll give it a shot when I get home tonight. If it turns out I can make this work, I'll link the tutorial for other users too.

Thank you so much!

As an aside though, yes, it does look scary. Fixing it to make it non-scary is On The List, but as it's, normally, somethign that most people don't do, it's not been prioritised.

However, it's actually quite easy, once you get passed the horrible interface inherited from Livejournal. When the interface frontend gets completely rewritten, it'll be a very powerful tool that isn't scary, hopefully.

is there a Guide for The First-Timer?

I don't think it ever got done, I know the one I keep meaning to write never did get done. I did a rought first draft explanation very soon after I finally figured out how to do it:

http://getting-started.dreamwidth.org/33324.html

No visuals, but when I finally turn it into something, there will be, and many of us are happy to handhold you through stuff if you want it.

However...

I strongly suggest you don't import your LJ layout. Instead, replicate it as best as possible in a DW layout, then ask someone (like, for example,me) to figure out how to fix the final bits that're beyond you.

And honestly? Anyone that now says "I would move but I hate DWs styles" is using that as an ill informed excuse for inaction, there are loads of them, and it's far more flexible than LJ, you can do whatever you like, on any of the layouts, with nothing more than very basic CSS.

So, what do you want your layout to look like? Or, what bits are you stuck on, I'd rather help you translate it into a DW style, because I like doing that, and it's a lot more powerful, but if you really insist on an LJ layout, then someone can help, although not my expertise.

I'm honestly not very fond of DW's style selection either, and for some of us (I'm an artist, so I do understand this) what it looks like is incredibly important. It really is an obstacle. Most of DW's ready-made styles feel clunky, hard-edged, and garish to me. I'm okay with the one I now have, but I don't even know how to add a header image to it, which I'd love to do (to be fair, no clue how I would do that in LJ-land, either, but I got to easily choose from a lot of fun headers over there when I changed my style, and here I don't see those; all the styles are pretty plain).

I don't need my DW to look just like my LJ. I don't mind a bit of change. It's just that so many of DW's layouts are SO hard on my eyes (including the incredibly harsh black-and-white scheme this comm uses. Ouch.)

Your offer of help is deeply appreciated! I will take you up on it when I can; I'm on my way out the door at the moment to go work on a painting. :-)

Agreed. I would gladly help at some point in fiddling with the CSS on some of these styles, because some of them are rough.

Feel free to submit suggestions to

dreamscapes, or if it's a bug in an existing style, report it to Support.

Would you mind explaining what type of style you'd like to have on DW? It would help designers if they knew what some users need. I find LJ selection extremely limited myself as compared to what DW offers considering it's such a 'young' site so I'm always surprised to hear this particular critique and would like to understand what it means exactly.

I'll do my best to help out, with the caveat of course that I am only me, and I can't speak for anyone else. I have noticed that DW has way more style options than when I originally joined, and I appreciate that there has been a lot of work done in a relatively short time.

One thing I have consistently seen is that the ZOMG HUGE TYPEFACES turn a lot of people off, because they don't know why the site is like that or that it can be changed in, like, ten seconds. I'd had my account for a couple years and had no idea about the px vs. em thing, why it was that way, and that I could make the type smaller by adjusting my browser default a couple points. I think it's great that DW is taking into consideration that not everyone has the same visual acuity. But those of us who don't need that larger type, come here and our first thought is, "Ugh! Big clunky shouty typeface!" So I'm not saying change it, but some of that big type needs to tell newcomers that the big type can be instantly changed.

In terms of bugs/technical problems, I think people have problems with many of the layouts being too wide, such that elements end up overlapping one another on the page. It isn't all the styles, but it does happen. No idea why, but I can't recall ever having that issue on LJ. Is that something I should report if I see it?

In order to explain what I mean by "clunky and garish," I will probably have to screencap some layouts and add notes about what drives my eyes crazy. Currently, I see this comm's layout as a black background with white text boxes, which in itself isn't so bad. It's the white/black stripe outline around the text boxes that's hurting my eyes. The black "Link Reply Thread Parent" bar isn't helping either. In this case, design + ultra-high-contrast color scheme = DNW.

Another example I can think of offhand: I like the Nouveau Oleanders in general, but the hard black/white oleanders at the top are bothersome to me, as are the rather proportionally over-sized (to my eye) harsh white/black flowers beside the subheaders. If I could keep the design but choose to, say, eliminate one of the two matched flower designs at the top, and/or change their color (and that of their smaller offspring) to something less glaring? That would rock. But as far as I could tell, those elements come in any color you want as long as it's black/white.

Oh, and I do miss having tags displayed in more compact fashion, so I didn't have to scroll waaaaayyyy down the page to get through the whole list.

It's late tonight, but I really will take some screencaps within the next week and explain what is/isn't working for me. Also, I take a lot of photos and may be able to offer a few for the development team to use as header images, if they're interested.

This is very helpful, thank you very much.

1. Regarding font sizing, I've submitted the idea of a FAQ to Denise.

2. We have some styles which are narrower such as Bases, Brittle and Blanket and I think you can customize the side margin width in Transmogrified but it's true that most styles use the major part of one's screen. You should definitely report overlapping when you see it. Styles are tested in a variety of browsers, font sizes and resolutions but not necessarily with small font sizes and small screen resolutions. As evidenced by the data collected (http://dw-design.dreamwidth.org/929.html) most Dreamwidth users have a mimimum 1024px wide resolution.

3. I think we have many styles with lower contrast, more muted colors or darker colors. We have some designers who are really good with gray, beige, sweet or dark colors, etc. such as timeasmymeasure, zvi, sarken and dancing_serpent. Even branchandroot did some too: Cinnamon Cream, Wooded, Gray, Shadows. You can type their name in the Search box of Customize to see all the themes they've made.
Maybe the difficulty is in finding these styles among our selection because we don't have color sorting like LJ does. I'm going to suggest it. I know we wanted to implement categories but it wasn't a pressing matter then.

4. As for clunkiness, I believe there are some simpler, cleaner-looking styles: Tabula Rasa, EasyRead, Boxes and Borders, Tranquility III, Refried Tablet and Stepping Stones come to my mind. We also have another upcoming style which I think look very clean: Compartmentalize). Maybe you can tell me what's missing from these for you.

5. Nouveau Oleanders: we try to make sure you can always remove or change the images from any of our style in Customize. I see that in Nouveau Oleanders, you can only remove the header image. I'll file a bug for the other ones. If you want to remove the big ones in the Header, though, go to the Style category then to Images/Header and remove what's in the box.

6. Tags: can you explain what you mean by 'compact fashion'? You mean separated by commas like in Smooth Sailing?

Edited (typos) 2010-09-11 08:00 (UTC)

Maybe the difficulty is in finding these styles among our selection because we don't have color sorting like LJ does. I'm going to suggest it. I know we wanted to implement categories but it wasn't a pressing matter then.

I was going to say something about this, and about other ways of categorizing for easy browsing - LJ lets you sort by themes like hobbies and travel, for instance, as well as colors. I was excited to see

blackmare's post here because I've also had a lot of trouble finding a style I like here. But now that they've actually laid out their frustrations I see that my preferences are pretty much the opposite - for example, I've settled on Nouveau Oleanders because I think the flowers are pretty and the strong black-on-white contrast is the only thing that's comfortable for me to read. :) I think that sorting the styles would help a lot.

Suggestion submitted!

And yes, DW manages with layouts and placement and options but we're not so good with graphics. One other major issue is that Dreamwidth is committed to flexibility, accessibility, customization, and Open Source: styles should function with all kinds of display modes, some elements should be ordered a certain way to make it easier to screenreaders, should use our Core structure and avoid tables to make CSS customization easy, should be easily and consistently customizable (options should be available in all styles), resources should be open so that other clone-sites can use the styles. LJ doesn't operate within these constraints (it hasn't got one single style which fits these conditions actually) and the majority of custom layouts you can find there don't either.

If you like complete light-on-dark styles, we have several styles called 'light on dark'. We have many others with other names, of course. We try to have at least one per style (this is part of our accessibility goals) Unfortunately, you're stuck with browsing to find them.

Edit: I can make a list for you if you want.

Edited 2010-09-12 16:26 (UTC)

I can make a list for you if you want.

Ah, no, that's so nice of you to offer, but I mean the kind I like is black text on a white background. I feel like I run into way too much orange on white or purple on mauve, so yeah, pretty much the opposite of blackmare's issue. :)

Thanks for explaining about the customization too. It's actually just with the discussion in the last few days that I'm starting to figure out how easy it is to change things like the layout of columns or using black text instead of orange using the customize journal page. (Being told it's easy to fix with CSS is not really helpful to those of us who don't know any CSS - but the customize journal page is great!) In the past when I looked through the available styles on the Select Journal Style page I've tended to automatically rule out all the ones that have two sidebars or not enough contrast, but now that I know I can change those things (without having to code them myself) I'll be able to consider more of them.

Oh well the majority of the styles is black text on white text so you have many more to choose from.

I'm glad you think it's easy. I think part of the confusion is that users from LJ aren't used to the customize categories and don't know where to do what. Just the name 'modules' instead of 'sidebar' had some people think they were stuck sidebar boxes. I think if you take time to explore a little and get used to the new labels, you'll come to wonder how you managed on LJ all these years. ;) (The LJ nav menu has me so confused now!)

I feel like I run into way too much orange on white or purple on mauve, so yeah, pretty much the opposite of blackmare's issue. :)

Actually, black text/white background is not a problem for me. On this community it wasn't the text/background thing that hurt my eyeballs, but the stark black/white stripes, or double borders around everything, that made me go OUCH.

I'm not terribly fond of the orange text/white ground or purple/purple myself. You can see on LJ what I've been using -- I'm blackmare_9 over there (sorry, don't have the hang of the off-site username thing yet).

One thing that annoys me with many of DW's standard layouts is all the freaking multicolored text on one page! Orange headers and blue subject titles! Wheeee! Or, you know, not. :-P

And when the newbie user wonders about changing such things, we get the message that if we aren't coding experts we should leave it alone. It begins to feel, if you poke around the comms where everyone and their dog is talking about how they customized their layout, that this place is full of People Who Know What They Are Doing, and then there's you.

Well, at least that's how I've been feeling. And I do like it here so much. It's just ... y'all established, journal-customizing types need to understand that for many of us, this is really intimidating. And there doesn't, at present, seem to be a specific place we can go to learn what we need to know. The information is all here, but it's really scattered around a bunch of different comms. Just gathering it into one place would be amazingly helpful.

Anyway -- I am off today to prepare for an art show and don't know when I'll be back, so if I'm not answering anyone for a while, that's why.

Editing quickly to add: I've just realized that my layout text at LJ is green in some spots, orange in others, and I need to clarify that on this layout it doesn't bug me because the green and the orange are rather subdued, not bright, and because the background is more a cream/ivory than stark white. It's softer and doesn't yell at me. I really, really like warm, not-quite-white backgrounds. Still lets me read very easily but softens the glare, and is also very nice for posting images, which I do a lot of. Or will do a lot of once we have a photo uploading function here.

Edited 2010-09-12 19:27 (UTC)

Ha, your LJ actually has really similar colors to mine (

sophinisba) - a white or almost-white background, black text, and subdued green and orange links.

I am finding customizing my journal to be easier on Dreamwidth than on LJ, but on the other hand I never found it necessary on LJ because there are so many off-the-shelf ones to choose from. So "don't try if you're not a coder" doesn't bother me as much as "If you don't like our styles just make your own" or "anyone can code this" because, eh, no, I've tried to code it and it's a mess. :) ETA: I get how it would be frustrating though if you're trying to break into it and people tell you not to bother! It does seem like something where putting together some basic information in one place would go a long way./ETA

There's been a lot of helpful discussion and suggestions in this post though (and also at this post by a layout maker.) Thanks a lot for making it, and I hope the art show goes well for you!

Edited (Sometimes I'm not a great listener.) 2010-09-12 22:33 (UTC)

Late entry, sorry, hope you don't mind.

I wanted to say what I'd like to see. I see nothing wrong with DW styles, but they're not what I have in mind for one journal I am working on here.

LJ's Disjointed is an excellent example of what I would like to see. Here is one example It still needs work, but it shows that it can be customizable to be transparent to the image in the background. It's hard to see here, but images can be put even in between the comment links.

A graphics showcase with flexibility, really, with a sci-fi scheme.

I believe opacity isn't part of Disjointed's features. That's something you coded yourself, right? Are you suggesting designers make some styles with opaque entries or that it be included as a new option in existing styles?

There are options in the journal customization for Disjointed to make either (or both)the borders, or journal entry areas transparent, instead of the given colors. (I'm not really adept at coding.)

I don't have any particular style in mind, really. I just thought it was a cool feature and it fit one of my journal concepts perfectly.

There are a quite a few dw selections that are nice, and I like the big fonts, lj's are too small for me!

Oh my apologies. I did look at the options and completely missed them. *facepalm*

I think it's really worth submitting this to

dw_suggestions. You should do it. ;)

Thanks! :) I'll go ahead and submit it to the dw_suggestions.

Oh oh oh, I know how to add header images! I think. The styles team (before my time, ha) tried to add it to the customization area a bunch of styles, including the one you are currently using. Go here:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options?group=style

To the images section. Look at the "Header image" part--I think the options there are *mostly* self explanatory, but let me know if you have any questions about it!

On that page now! Thank you.

So ... what I have to do is host the header image elsewhere and then put the image URL in the header image field on this page? That's what it looks like to me. I, um, did mention I was new at this, yes?

What I don't see is whether there are specs for the pixel size of the header. As in -- if it's over X wide by Y high, it's going to be cropped or cause the layout to go wonky. How do I know how large in pixels to make the image I'm going to use?

Also--I can say that one of the big things holding more image-y styles back is that, well, a lot of the styles team members are good with CSS and HTML and...not so good with art. I think you've said you're an artist, and if you're the kind of person who'd want to envision some styles for other people to make, head over to

dreamscapes with your ideas maybe? I know I'd be happy to implement artistic styles--I just don't have the skills to do the art part, though I covet them and have been practicing with my new tablet.

If you give me some size (in pixel height/width and dpi) specs, I'll do my best to help out with that.

I may have limited resources, being all fine-arty rather than digitally-enhanced, but I should at least have one or two good things to offer.

Also there is

dreamwidthlayouts which has CSS styles based around preexisting DW layouts that might be less intimidating for you to implement.

Yeah, that comm is actually where I went the last time I tried to customize my journal.

It ... didn't work out so well for me. None of the layout elements went where they were supposed to go. I've been scared to attempt it again.

One of my favourite DW features is that the nav bar has buttons for "reload page" in "my style" and "light style" over on the right.

I use this when I'm viewing a journal or comm where I find the style too distracting or hard to read.

If you did mockups of styles as either HTML or big graphics, and posted it to

style_system or

stylemakers, you might find someone who knows how to use the style system who would like to collaborate on "softer" layouts.

If you just would like to make color schemes for existing layouts, you can read the Quick and Dirty Guide to Creating Color Schemes and then submit your color schemes to

dreamscapes.

And if you don't want to get into any of that, that's cool, too, but we would like to have styles that appeal to people who don't like any of the styles we currently have, and I don't know that any of the people who have been making styles are suddenly going to get hit with a brand new aesthetic any time soon.

Edited 2010-09-09 01:16 (UTC)

Just commenting to say Thanks! For posting this original thing, and this comment.

I too wish I could make DW look some better way and I've taken a run at it about 3 times and it's still daunting and my look is still ungood. Eh. I hope you can pull through, and maybe leave a trail.

If I can get it figured out, I will want to help other people do the same.

It really is daunting, and I get the feeling that so many of DW's founders/contributors have been doing CSS and stuff for so long that they don't realize they're speaking what is, to many of us, a completely foreign language. And then the "advanced customization" area comes with a big warning sign that tells us newbies we really, really shouldn't try this at home.

So it's scary. I hope we can find ways to make it less so.

It's just that so many of DW's layouts are SO hard on my eyes (including the incredibly harsh black-and-white scheme this comm uses. Ouch.)

Just in case you didn't know, Dreamwidth has a white-on-black skin. You can select it at http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display / Site Skin.

Would you mind explaining what type of style you'd like to have on DW? It would help designers if they knew what some users need, especially if it's simply a matter of color schemes as these are very easy to do. I find LJ selection extremely limited myself as compared to what DW offers considering it's such a 'young' site so I'm always surprised to hear this particular critique and would like to understand what it means exactly.

Edited 2010-09-10 21:54 (UTC)

I'm using Celerity for the site skin now, and I really like it. Light and pleasant without being glaringly white.

So as far as site skin, I'm very happy and I like DW's a lot better than LJ's rather stark mostly-white (and combined with their current Graveyard Butterflies header, double ick).

I'll do some linking and/or screencaps for you soon, because it's so hard to convey what I mean without visuals. I appreciate your response and will do my best to be helpful instead of just griping.

Someone's already mentioned

dreamwidthlayouts, but I'd like to add my own recommendation -- most of the custom layouts posted there come with instructions and work with existing DW layouts rather than importing made-for-LJ layouts, so you don't have to mess around with layers and whatnot.

Random note: the style you're using right now is being turned into an official one. :)

When I attempted a couple different styles from that comm, what I got was a total mess, not the layout I wanted.

That was a while ago, but I've been really discouraged about trying again.

What I'm trying to convey here is that the instructions are not available easily, and the ones I have seen -- scattered about in various places, in bits and pieces -- do not make sense for people like me.

dreamwidthlayouts even states in its profile that it is not a help community and that one must ask individual layout makers for assistance if it's needed. That's rather uncomfortable, asking a total stranger to help you set something up when that really isn't what they signed on for. It would be SO NICE if, instead of "ask the layout maker who may or may not be willing/able to explain all this" there was a link to "Go to [helpfulnewbiecomm] for beginner instructions and assistance."

So far, I can't find where "helpfulnewbiecomm" exists. Am I just missing it?

If this can't help you, nothing will. And, well,

getting_started is essentially "helpfulnewbiecomm".

"helpfulnewbiecomm" should be

style_system - they welcome all kinds of questions there, and someone will probably write a custom layout that does what you want.

Layout help for the utterly clueless?

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