The new layout (dun dun dunn)

No layouts I’ve been making this summer were doing it for me – they lacked something. So I thought, what are my favourite layouts on the internet? What do I like most about them? I found a few common elements, so behold (or as the ancient Romans said, “ecce!’) the results:

• Dark text on white.
• 12px Arial, with serif fonts for titles.
• When the background for things in the sidebar is just slightly different than the background of the page itself.
• KAWAAAII~♥ The sites that look like they’ve been taken over by pixelled emoticons (preferably the animated ASCII kind, ooh yeah). My inner child is a thirteen year old girl but alas, I’ve grown out of using emoticons. They’re so cute…
• Pink. If something comes in pink, it always looks best in pink. I’ve been trying to restrain myself from using it in layouts, since maybe I’m becoming too obsessed with pink… by why not embrace it?
• Dotted lines and polka dots. Aaahaha. …Promise that’s the last of the emoticons.
• Tag clouds, especially if it reveals unhealthy obsessions. Sadly I can’t do this with FanUpdate, and sorting that out was quite tricky (stop laughing…). WordPress? Rather more daunting.
• When Flickr is incorporated into the header. It’s colourful. It changes all the time. If only I didn’t hate uploading photos to the internet. Haha.
• Pretty photos and illustrations in blog posts.

Next was incorporating as many of these as I could with… my own style… without blatantly copying any layouts… and here we are. Easy.