Tumblr themes designed to assault the eyes -

[SeaPancake]

Do these people even know basic graphic design? Who am I kidding, they don't, but are their eyes so busted up that they don't realize the monstrosities they create with their own two hands?

Light fairy pink text on a white background: BAD
Black and yellow black and yellow black and yellow: FUCK NO
NEON COLORS: No no no no hell no no no no.

It's like they want to punish people with functioning rods and cones in their eyeballs.

 

[HY 140]

I hate it when people use fucking pastel pink and tiny ass light blue text, like god damn i cant even read you're dumb posts without straining my eyes to see it. Thats the main reason why people with pastel themes should be mocked tbh

 

[Somsnosa]

I don't mind when artists use small text themes since it makes sense to make it more images-focused. Woke discourse accounts using such themes is just stupid, but no one's gonna read those tl;dr so who cares

 

[Sylvie Paula Paula]

There are also the themes that are TINY EVERYTHING - 400x200 containers, size 8px font, you can't find the links because they're jumbled & scattered across the page... bonus points when the background doesn't adjust to the screen size.

I've talked to other theme makers, and people who don't know an ounce of graphic design sometimes get mocked for it in private. Depends on the person, though (you'd be genuinely surprised about how much drama there is in the theme making community).

 

[admiral]

Tumblr is for tards. Real graphic design is spray painting your artwork onto pigs and letting them loose in your local DMV.

 

[NG 070]

Eh, it's just the resurgence of mid '00s-era LiveJournal and personal sites/fansites hosted on a trendy .nu domain making a comeback, thus proving that everything is in some way cyclical.

 

[Cable 7]

Lowkey, the worst blogs are the ones where you can't even find the button that sends you to the next page. Fuck that noise.

 

[Benine Bovine]

Those tumblr blogs are designed so that True and Honest autists either get confused and scared or get sensory overload and close the tab. Its in essence a preemptive strike against trolling.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Looks like bad website design didn't die with Web 1.0.

 

[Sylvie Paula Paula]

> blog about ableism and how everything gotta cater the disabled
> have blog that, if it wont make your brains or eyes disabled, will offer font so fucking small or in shitty color combination even healthy person can't read that shit

A lot of blogs - specifically in the roleplaying community - that advocate for disability inclusion tend to have themes that are tiny on larger screens anyways. Hell, I remember a pair of theme makers (who ran a blog called "vcnilla") being driven out of the theme making community for not being disability inclusive. You can find archives of their old themes (and even some of the codes) on the web archive. And while the RP community is clique-ish, you'd be surprised about the amount of cliques in the regular theme making community (such as theme-making "networks").

If I remember correctly, one of Tumblr's largest theme archive blogs theme-hunter happens to have a "blacklist" of not just thieves, but of normal theme makers to not reblog from. Hell, there were rumours about a newer theme maker being someone who was accused of stealing codes (they later ended up moving blogs) because of that specific clique. I think it even got to the point where the person the rumours were about ended up getting death threats. I don't remember who's exactly in this "clique" other than the mods of theme-hunter and some people who happen to be in the Korean RP community (aka they make OCs that use Korean celebrities as "faceclaims").

It's just like high school, except these people are teenagers & young adults bitching about HTML and [x] stealing [y]'s theme idea.

 

[Cosmos]

I cannot count the amount of times I clicked on a blog that had content I was interested in only to be driven away by their godawful theme. There are a few tricks/websites you can use to make it easier, but you shouldn't have to jump through hoops just to view a fucking blog. I don't understand why people choose such awful, indecipherable layouts.

Some absolute trash I've seen includes:

• Layouts that don't even show a next/previous page button
• Autoplay (never, ever, ever have anything with autoplay)
• Awful, clashing colors
• Text that's too light to read
• Ugly font choice
• Infinite scrolling

 

[m0rnutz]

> blog about ableism and how everything gotta cater the disabled
> have blog that, if it wont make your brains or eyes disabled, will offer font so fucking small or in shitty color combination even healthy person can't read that shit

I mean I love details with colors that rape your eyes from front and behind, but if the shit is impossible to be read then it is time to reconsider the blog theme.

Ngl, one time I sent an anon to gaylor-moon that said "your theme is shit and is bad on eyes, fucking change it". They weren't too happy.

It's because the themes are "aesthetic". Normally this is okay if your blog is strictly just images one after the other fitting a common pallette, but in kidcore and enby culture these themes are constantly rehashed and swiped from blogs, with the blogger crediting themselves and saying "DONUT STEEL"

I wrote my own themes from scratch using the default theme as a backbone structure, and that way the code isn't overcomplicated and I can very easily adjust one factor and have it change across the entire style. With these aesthetic themes, it's not that easy.

Moreso, it's also a common occurrence to use pixelart and sprites, because not only are they the hipster thing to bring back the old school web, but this type of style is incredibly common over in Japan.

Some absolute trash I've seen includes:

• Layouts that don't even show a next/previous page button
• Autoplay (never, ever, ever have anything with autoplay)
• Awful, clashing colors
• Text that's too light to read
• Ugly font choice
• Infinite scrolling

The only thing I will disagree with is never having autoplay. It's fine, but only if you have a fucking pause button anywhere visible to stop the audio. Another suggested practice is to offer the reader the ability to toggle various aesthetic features, such as music, animations, layout, shadows, preloaders, or if the extra bio pages are internally displayed artificial iframes or open in a new tab.

But of course, hardly anyone knows how to fucking to do this. Their code is literally baby's first webpage, and to them if it works on their screen, it should obviously work everywhere.

Case in point? @floette can't code for shit and her own sidebar cuts off important content. Her infinite scrolling feature is shit and you have to scroll down and back up to the top for anything to load.

 

[Sylvie Paula Paula]

It's because the themes are "aesthetic". Normally this is okay if your blog is strictly just images one after the other fitting a common pallette, but in kidcore and enby culture these themes are constantly rehashed and swiped from blogs, with the blogger crediting themselves and saying "DONUT STEEL"

Usually these themes are made with base codes (from other people's blogs) because apparently HTML is hard (and trying to make your own base code is too). But all of them (or at least the ones that get popular) look like this:

so you can't tell the difference between one or the other.

Case in point? @floette can't code for shit and her own sidebar cuts off important content. Her infinite scrolling feature is shit and you have to scroll down and back up to the top for anything to load.

To be fair, her theme wasn't made by her (the credit's really hard to find, but it is there. Bottom right hand side). This is the original.

 

[Keystone]

The absolute worst offenders are the ones without an "Archive/Gallery" tab, forcing you to go through each page if you want to see everything. Like if I see a neat piece of art and go to their tumblr page so I can see the archive of their other nice art and there's no "Gallery" tab? And pages upon pages of fucking inane rambling text entries between each actual art entry? Instant fucking shitlist.

It's insult to injury when there's no gallery tab and a gaudy, eye raping color scheme.

 

[0 1]

A good joke by George Carlin once went "think of how stupid the average person is; and realize that half of them are stupider than that." Say what you want about George Carlin but it's applicable as some form of an explanation. Any schlub can just make a tumblr account, and tumblr users aren't known for their stunning intelligence. Average Jane and Joe don't know the first clue about proper utilization of color or organization, so it's not surprising that they think yellow on off-white is perfectly legible. I'm also willing to believe that they'll reject any criticism that says otherwise.

 

[denpakei]

If they're so intent on having such eyerapey themes, they could at least include an option to increase text size/change the text color. But I guess "it's hard and ruins muh ~*~*aesthetic*~*~"

EDIT: Typo.

 

[Benine Bovine]

I made a mockup of the avg. tumblr user

 

[DICKPICSRUS]

shame we don't have any examples in the op.

I'm on mobile so I'm sharing a link
https://doodle--trash.tumblr.com

 

[denpakei]

shame we don't have any examples in the op.

I'm on mobile so I'm sharing a link
https://doodle--trash.tumblr.com

View attachment 374858

This isn't even the worst I've seen. At least the header isn't some awful eyestraining gif.

 

[HY 140]

View attachment 374793

I made a mockup of the avg. tumblr user

its missing "X character is my husbando"