A couple of LJ-related icons, some commentary about recent changes and a poll
Okay, some of you might have noticed a significant change on your journals/communities recently in the wake of LJ implementing their their new default navigation menu all over the place, as announced here at news. Everybody who has switched to the new design at some point, will now see the huge teal bulky navigation menu on all their journals and communities instead of the old smaller but easily customizable controlstrip. As promised in the news announcement LJ has fixed the missing 'filtering on the old friends page' option today by implementing a second bar, expanding the whole navigation menu on your friends page to a whooping height of 103px! Depending on your screen resolution that is quite a lot of space, especially if you take into account that the new navigation menu isn't customizable at all (so far) and therefore clashing hard with quite a lot of all the lovely custom layouts out there!
In LJ’s defence it should be said that there are a lot of very good and valid reasons for this change. The links in new navbar are also a lot more structured and actually quite easy to navigate. Apparently LJ also did a good job with the proclaimed adaptability to various screen sizes and resolutions (of course I can only speak from my personal experience here, but it’s working well on all devices I’ve checked so far).
Why is london_fan complaining at all, if it’s such a great change, you might ask? Well, I've coded quite a lot of custom layouts over the years, mostly for myself and some communities, but occasionally for friends as well. Some of these layouts work just fine with the new navbar, most of them… not so much (to put it nicely). Of course it’s not LJ’s fault that people use custom layouts that aren’t exactly compatible with the new navbar, but I wish they would have taken this fact into consideration and offered some options for customization, like they ultimately did for their new friends feed as well. Come on, at least the colours should be customizable to match personal layouts, don’t you think? Not everybody is a fan of huge teal bars on top of their journals.
However, there's something that makes this whole change a real hassle for layout makers:
Note that the updated menu version is only for the redesigned version of the LiveJournal site. If you are using the older version of the site, the menu changes do not apply.
Yes, if you haven’t noticed any changes, you’re either blind or still using the old design of the page. So basically we now have two groups of users who see completely different versions of the navigation menu! That is a nightmare for layout makers. I want my layouts to look good for everyone, but now I can’t tinker around with the space at the top of the layout anymore without making it look weird for one of these user groups.
For example, the updated menu completely screwed up the house_of_london header. This layout adapts to the width of the viewer’s screen and therefore doesn't simply use .headerimage. Some parts of the fake header image are actually a background image of .body. When LJ implemented their margin-top changes to accommodate their new navigation menu they screwed up this layout completely. The obvious fix was to adapt my CSS to the new 103px navigation menu. Now it looks fine on the redesigned page, but there's a lot of negative space for people still using the old design:
Click the respective thumbnails to see the full images.
Well, I’d like to figure out how to deal with this issue in the future (if I can’t find a way to customize the new navigation menu with CSS eventually). The easiest "solution" probably would be to never ever again code layouts that need a fixed margin-top to work. In that case LJ could add or detract all the space they need for their menu bar(s) on the respective pages as needed and the layout would still look fine. However, I love to play around with images as fake headers instead of just using some boring stationary .headerimage. Therefore I’d like to know how much of an issue this actually is for you. So, could you please take a couple of seconds for this poll? Thank you!
Poll LJ's new navigation menu
Well, as a bonus for all the layout makers who currently despair of these changes (and anyone else of course), I made some new(-ish) icons, inspired by a conversation with sireesanwar over at s2flexisquares. The original non-animated version of the first icon can be found here. Enjoy!
→ Please credit either london_fan or house_of_london.
→ Don't hotlink!
→ Please don't alter any of my icons.
→ Don't post them elsewhere and/or claim them as your your own work.
→ If you like what you see, feel free to join and/or watch house_of_london.
→ Comments are love.
In LJ’s defence it should be said that there are a lot of very good and valid reasons for this change. The links in new navbar are also a lot more structured and actually quite easy to navigate. Apparently LJ also did a good job with the proclaimed adaptability to various screen sizes and resolutions (of course I can only speak from my personal experience here, but it’s working well on all devices I’ve checked so far).
Why is london_fan complaining at all, if it’s such a great change, you might ask? Well, I've coded quite a lot of custom layouts over the years, mostly for myself and some communities, but occasionally for friends as well. Some of these layouts work just fine with the new navbar, most of them… not so much (to put it nicely). Of course it’s not LJ’s fault that people use custom layouts that aren’t exactly compatible with the new navbar, but I wish they would have taken this fact into consideration and offered some options for customization, like they ultimately did for their new friends feed as well. Come on, at least the colours should be customizable to match personal layouts, don’t you think? Not everybody is a fan of huge teal bars on top of their journals.
However, there's something that makes this whole change a real hassle for layout makers:
Note that the updated menu version is only for the redesigned version of the LiveJournal site. If you are using the older version of the site, the menu changes do not apply.
Yes, if you haven’t noticed any changes, you’re either blind or still using the old design of the page. So basically we now have two groups of users who see completely different versions of the navigation menu! That is a nightmare for layout makers. I want my layouts to look good for everyone, but now I can’t tinker around with the space at the top of the layout anymore without making it look weird for one of these user groups.
For example, the updated menu completely screwed up the house_of_london header. This layout adapts to the width of the viewer’s screen and therefore doesn't simply use .headerimage. Some parts of the fake header image are actually a background image of .body. When LJ implemented their margin-top changes to accommodate their new navigation menu they screwed up this layout completely. The obvious fix was to adapt my CSS to the new 103px navigation menu. Now it looks fine on the redesigned page, but there's a lot of negative space for people still using the old design:
Click the respective thumbnails to see the full images.
Well, I’d like to figure out how to deal with this issue in the future (if I can’t find a way to customize the new navigation menu with CSS eventually). The easiest "solution" probably would be to never ever again code layouts that need a fixed margin-top to work. In that case LJ could add or detract all the space they need for their menu bar(s) on the respective pages as needed and the layout would still look fine. However, I love to play around with images as fake headers instead of just using some boring stationary .headerimage. Therefore I’d like to know how much of an issue this actually is for you. So, could you please take a couple of seconds for this poll? Thank you!
Poll LJ's new navigation menu
Well, as a bonus for all the layout makers who currently despair of these changes (and anyone else of course), I made some new(-ish) icons, inspired by a conversation with sireesanwar over at s2flexisquares. The original non-animated version of the first icon can be found here. Enjoy!
→ Please credit either london_fan or house_of_london.
→ Don't hotlink!
→ Please don't alter any of my icons.
→ Don't post them elsewhere and/or claim them as your your own work.
→ If you like what you see, feel free to join and/or watch house_of_london.
→ Comments are love.