Welcome to ljskins!

[soph]

To all those coming over from lj_nifty: Hi!

Welcome to ljskins, a community for skin designers to create their own LiveJournal skins and showcase them. You'll find that all of the skin postings here follow a common format, so it should be easy to find what you want.

If you're reading this, you've probably looked at some of the skins here and wondered if this community offers anything else. The good news is, yes it does! This community will serve two purposes:

• Primarily, it'll serve as a directory of skins by people who have designed their own skins and wish to showcase them here. All the skins in the community will be available using the "skins" tag, and they will also be available through the community's memories. Although we'll be starting off small and posting skins that were already designed before the community launched, it's the community - people like you - who'll be best able to turn this into a useful resource for people who wish to customise LJ. Which leads us onto the next point...
• It'll also be a resource for designers to help create new skins. Membership to this community is open, and designers will be able to join and share their knowledge about creating their own skins. To alleviate confusion, all such designer posts will be tagged with appropriate discussion tags by the moderators.

The community tag list allows you to browse through the skins by a number of different methods. Each tag will have a prefix which describes what kind of post it is, or how it's sorted:

• author - this prefix allows you to look for all skins by a certain author.
• category - this lets you hone in on specific skin types you want to see. The category list hasn't been finalised yet (and in fact it's not even formal yet) but I'm thinking it'll turn out well if you want to see, for example, all original skins, or all skins that emulate old siteschemes, etc.
• designers - this designates all posts meant for skin designers. Unless you've selected to join the community, you probably won't see many (if any) of these, as posts for designers are posted members-only to avoid cluttering the skin views. Membership is open, so if you want to try your hand at designing a skin, join up and take a browse.
• introductions - this is for introductions of any kind. Note that because of the nature of this community, it's rare that people will actually post individual introductions; instead, this tag is mainly for things like the community introduction. (Note that all designer discussion should be posted members-only, too)
• meta - posts about the community itself from your maintainers, snakeling and I. Official posts such as the Submission Policy are tagged with "official" as the prefix instead.
• official - these posts codify some standards for the community, or are otherwise "official posts" from the maintainers.
• skins - the meat of the community. The standalone tag "skins" is on every skin post, while the subdivisions allow you to look for which siteschemes the skin works with. Generally, skins which work with Vertigo will have a sidebar, while skins which work with Horizon will have drop-down menus instead, but skins don't have to keep the layout of the parent scheme so this isn't a guarantee. It's a good thing to go by, though.

Skin designers will want to join the community in order to gain access to the members-only posts, as ideas on creating new skins will be posted there.

By the way, don't be put off by the word "designers". Even if you know only a little CSS, and you can use that CSS to make LJ's siteschemed pages a little nicer for you, or a little easier to use, there's every chance that someone else in the community will appreciate what you've done too!

If you want to submit a skin you've designed, check out the Submission Guide for more information. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have an enjoyable time here!