#5

You don't have a pretty coded layout

(So I'm not gonna read)

Gosh, I feel so old. I remember the days of AIM Roleplaying, writing fanfics on blogs and it having absolutely NO aesthetic quality. It was just writing, and yet everyone loved it. This was obviously back before the cool, hipster scene of using PB's (play bys) and making your work filled with complicated coding and pretty, moving gifs and artwork that seems to take over from the content itself.

It feels that the fanfics with the pretty, coded forewords and lovely little gif-galore character bios are the ones that are popular. Are we turning into a group of people dependant on prettiness? 

Coding, like posters for me, are chosen by the author because it helps represent their work. I don't mind it, sometimes they look pretty on the eyes and can help turn a chunk of boring text in a foreword into some semblance of structure. Plot over at this side, general informatiom to the left, some character bios at the bottom. BAM, done. 

Neat and presentable.

Pretty codes are all well and good, but they should NOT take away from your content, nor should they be the main focal point on your work. Add them as a little extra, or to make it more structured, okay. NOT just so you have an excuse to post up millions of gifs, use weird looking fonts and boarders and make me unable to find what I'm looking for. 

There's nothing more off putting, to me anyway, than a fanfic filled with useless coding that's just not needed. If I wanted this, I'd have carried on Roleplaying over on IF forums, which have also over the last two/three years become all about the pretty codes. A code for an announcement? Really? Hover codes to read your actual topics? Now come on people... It's NOT NEEDED.

I see this mentioned a lot, that most fanficer's are young, so I suppose to them the appeal of pretty layouts, gifs and images is great. For me, personally, I honestly find too much completely off putting, even if the content is good, sometimes I find it difficult to get my head around the ridiculous amounts of codes. 

I'm from an era where a coded fanfic meant bolded text, underlined, centred etc, just like this one, I suppose. That's how I feel comfortable, still. Don't get me wrong, I can code just fine (and from scratch, I studied ICT, majoring in webdesign) so I know my way around HTML and CSS like the back of my hand. I think I'm just old, because I don't see the need to use it. You can read my bold, centred and large text just fine, I'm sure. 

But from what I've seen, there's three types of layouts;

1) A very neat layout with decent sized fonts, colours and design. Everything is presented so its easy to rea, understand, find and if necessary, quote. They use only a simple picture of their character, which is all they need, and they make the effort to keep their descriptions so again, you understand them. The colours are pastel or dark easy on the eyes and makes the font easier to read, as it stands out - in a good way.

2) Huge, bright cold layouts with either ridiculously small narrow text or absolutely huge text that's bolded and stretched in legnth. They use tonnes of gifs, often overlapping their words and include random symbols where they're just not needed. The text is set to a silly, unreadable font such as this one, and they use neon colours that blind said reader. It's an eyesore, but it's hip and trendy. 

3) Those that just don't use layouts, in the sense of coded ones, anyhow. They may have graphics and make sure of the codes offered through the AFF posting, but they don't add much else. Their layouts are simple, extremely easy to read and are most likely to be people focused more on writing, than attracting others to them using bright colours and pretty layouts. I like to think of these are the mature, older generation, like me. Orr they just can't code...

Maybe I'm being too negative, but like I keep mentioning, I'm an oldie. Too me, your content matters. I don't care if your layout is absolutely FLAWLESS, unless your writing is, too. I won't read your fic! Content should always win over aesthetics. But, that's not the case on here, seemingly. Beauty outranks the authors writing, and that's just wrong.

The way I see it:

If your fanfic doesn't have pretty layout, nobody will read it.

Whats your opinion on layouts?