#rp themes

Anonymous asked:  Don’t know if this has been asked before but it seems like a lot of rp blogs have “Container themes” (some custom styled, some regular). I know it’s all preference but why is common preference since it seems smaller and a bit hard to read if it’s minimal.

This is such a thinly veiled gentle way of asking me, in frustration, to tell everyone your itty bitty god damn aesthetics boxes are hurting people’s eyes and driving them off.

So Short PSA: They’re pretty, but for the love of cute animals, try using a scaling-in-size theme that does the same thing? They’re like blogs for ants. Some folks, I admit, can’t even browse blogs like that. I personally leave your carefully curated tiny tiny, tiny, boxes because show up on like one quarter of my screen at a size smaller than my thumb. 

Round about ways to get around this? You can open those blogs in your dash with x-kit. Or you can just use ctrl and + to make the thing fit your big ass screen, but then everything’s blurry.Goodbye aesthetics, hello visibility! You can also try something like Just Read for Chrome or Reader for Firefox. They strip the CSS entirely and turn the webpage into your submissive eager toy.

Just to be clear: be careful about your choices if you choose a blog design with a smaller screen in mind. Folks with bigger screens find it hard to read, so it may drive us off, and give us eyestrain, which is shit for finding new RP. 

I guess I should do a ‘what’s important when picking a theme’ thing to help maximize use for others? So here we go, kids.

Text visibility in themes is extraordinarily important. Roleplaying is about your writing and your gifs I guess here on the wacky world of Tumblr, but mostly writing. Every other website has a focus on it for a reason, it’s literally how you communicate prose. Gif’s are cute, but you don’t need them. 

So, lesson one. Make the text visible. It should be around 12px large, you can go down to 10px but that’s going to make some people avoid your blog, which stops you from finding potential players! That’s bad! So go with 12px unless you have a damn good reason, or don’t really have issues finding partners.

Make the colors readable. Do not put red on cyan, don’t do some faded white text that looks mysterious on some dappled background. Don’t overlay it with effects. Don’t do white on black, or black on white. Find a comfortable medium, something you can read at length without burning out your eyes. Many people favor a darker background with lighter text to avoid that burning sensation that white can produce, many others hate that like the dickens so hey if anyone codes themes looks at this, a ‘nightmode’ switch for colors in a theme being dark on white or white on dark would be the coolest thing ever.

Also, do not put it in a god damn tiny ass fixed width box. Theme coders! I love you, I do, but please try using flexible elements. Making the div width a percentage instead of a fixed pixel size can do fucking wonders for people. It lets all the elements fit without being a mess. If you use background-position you can set an image to the right, the left, the center bottom, whatever. Use those for all 4 sides of the box, and then throw in a god damn background-size and background-size-moz of like 100% of the div holding them. Including the background of the entire body! Suddenly your whole fucking theme resizes to fit! It’s a miracle of god! It’s not perfect 100% of the time when you’re being a tricky little shit, and sure absolute positioning and a fixed pixel width can be useful in places, but don’t just go 800px wide because it’s the typical smallest screen size and therefore the “best” when you can do flexible coding!

… I may have gotten a bit nerdy there, sorry for anyone I lost on some of those notes. Anyways.

So you as a roleplayer should pick a simple theme, a banner on top is pretty but having to scroll down on every single new page gets old quickly. If you want people to read a lot of your posts rather often, sticking to sidebars is for the best. It’ll save them precious seconds, and they’ll stick around to read longer.

Make sure you navigation is way visible. Left and right arrows somewhere should be tasteful, but not hidden in the bushes somewhere. You want to be able to go from page to page easily. If the same way, avoid endless scrolling! Seriously! It’s neat on one hand, but trying to find your place after your browser tab crashes and you’re 200 pages into the blog is so horrible some people close the window and never return. You’ve killed another chance. Go for pagination, not endless scroll as often as possible.

Tags are important, so is the time posted, and links to profiles/OOC/tag lists/open thread tags and the like. These should all be visible and easy to access so people can get online, check the tag on your blog, see when you replies, and reply themselves. New people want to read your OOC, character profile, and information about everything important. So have your Out of Character and rules done and ready to go before you open shop!

Fancy elements should always be done with accessibility in mind. Do not pick some weird fucking mouse pointer that is hard as fuck to use, they’re cute, but make sure they have a point on them so people can see how to use them right. Don’t make the scrollbars too small to click. Don’t make a constant glitter shower on every single page that blurs out the writing and constantly distracts people. Avoid colors that clash painfully, red on blue for instance causes weird shapes at the corner of the eye and is generally unpleasant. You want your space to be as open and comfortable as possible.

This doesn’t mean don’t have cute art, or sweet fonts (at least for titles and the like, maybe don’t use cursive for the actual text font). It doesn’t mean some gifs can’t be managed, or  a dropdown header that only appears when you raise your mouse can’t be done. Just do it tastefully. Work hard at making your roleplay blog something everyone can read, and you’ll be that much closer to getting more partners to play with. Good luck!

spllcraft:

Hi everyone !  Since tumblr did what it did,  I thought I would make some masterlists of content creators in order to promote them now that Tumblr made it difficult to navigate the tags.  The first list concerns theme makers and you’ll find both free and premium themes. ( don’t hesitate to send me your url if you aren’t in the list, I’d be more than happy to add you to it. ♥ )

THEME MAKER.

@theme-hunter​  *⛧⋆  source for themes and theme making

@rpthemes​  *⛧⋆  masterlist of rp themes

@artitsics *⛧⋆ theme tag

@scftlcves​ *⛧⋆ theme tag

@pirateskinned  ( free & patreon )  *⛧⋆ free theme , premium theme

@dolcevitae​  ( free & payhip )  *⛧⋆ free theme,all themes

@halfbluds  ( free & patreon )  *⛧⋆ free theme,premium theme

@maziekeen​ *⛧⋆ theme tag

@jaeshyuns​ *⛧⋆ theme tag

@mintrps​  ( free & payhip )  *⛧⋆ theme tag

@springdoy​  ( free, patreon & payhip )  *⛧⋆ free theme , premium theme

@heochanz​  ( free & patreon )  *⛧⋆ theme tag

@jinsoouls​ *⛧⋆ theme tag

@rmon *⛧⋆ theme tag  

@wildfluower​ *⛧⋆ theme tag

@khevinday  ( free & patreon  ) *⛧⋆ theme tag

@drunkblushed​ *⛧⋆ theme tag

@hoesies​ *⛧⋆ theme tag

@orpheused *⛧⋆ theme tag

@iniziare​  *⛧⋆   theme tag

@bridgetowakandabasecodes​  *⛧⋆ theme tag

@sovbin​ *⛧⋆ theme tag

@alydae​ *⛧⋆ theme tag