Layout Contest Term IX

[theaeblackthorn.livejournal.com]

Attention to all of you that are graphically gifted and know your way around LJ's coding and CSS quirks! It's time for this term's main community layout contest! Whee! You know you want to enter, right? I mean, who doesn't want everyone that comes to HiH to see their lovely work?

Here are the requirements:
1. The layout must be in Hufflepuff colours their winning of the House Cup. However, it must not be all about the Badgers, even if they are pretty awesome. It needs to celebrate HiH as a whole, and as long as the primary colors in the design are yellow and black, you can do that however you like.

2. The layout must be easy to read for just about everyone. Basically, this means no forcing the text size, and allowing a decent amount of contrast between text and background colors. (please with the contrast! I can't read light fonts on light backgrounds, it hurts my eyes!)

3. It needs to have a matching icon to use as the HiH Default.

4. You may include any other graphics you wish, but all are optional. Ideas: alternates for the "lj user=" man; designs for blockquotes; a header; background images/patterns; bullet thingies for links; &c!

5. The layout must be based on an S2 layout. It needs to support links on the sidebar for the Houses, Tags, and Page Summary at the very least.

6. Unless you (or someone else?) is willing to donate $5 to make hogwartsishome a paid community for a period of time, the layout must be workable for a free account. (And we're not going to Plus, I really despise the ads.)

7. You need to be able to set it up for us, because I know I don't have the time to tweek things to make them 'just so'. You also need to be open to changes. If we vote for your layout, but the text needs to be darker, or the background darker or whatever.

Any questions? Ask them here and we'll make sure to answer them as quickly as possible. There will be a drop post for them put up in the next few days. Entries must be in by... Weds, Sept 12th.

Points and Knuts: Layouts are a big deal! For participating, you earn 25 points and 10 knuts. Nice, huh?
First place will receive: 75 points and 40 knuts
Second place: 60 points and 30 knuts
Third place: 50 points and 20 knuts

Comments

[theaeblackthorn.livejournal.com]

Basically, LJ has S1, and S2.

S1 we're not interested in for this contest.
S2, it uses a base code that LJ provides, a good one to use to base this off of is Smooth Sailing or Flexible Squares. You select one of these and then use CSS to customise it.

CSS can be created as an external sheet. filename.css, which can be used to control the appearance of several elemetns of the journal pagtes. There are some communities that premake them and you can customise the colours, graphics and certain elements, but the most fun way (I find) is to get the basic style sheet for a layout and then just customise from there.

Good resources are w3 Schools as a CSS resource (http://www.w3schools.com).

(sorry if this is condesceding and you know a lot of this stuff, I thought going from scratch was the easiest way to do this :))

If you'd like the basic CSS that LJ uses for its styles, go to an uncustomised journal using the sheet you'd like, right click, view source and look for a bit in the code that says something like:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://stat.livejournal.com/lj_base-app.css" />

The url there will lead to the style sheet for a style :)

Any help?

[theaeblackthorn.livejournal.com]

Yeppers, as always :)

[theaeblackthorn.livejournal.com]

We'll accept either option, you can provide the css and I can screencap it, a journal where it can be viewed, or a screencap of it. :)