2005 Style Contest Vote

I have a mild speech balloon obsession, this is the result. A balloon is drawn from the users icon and filled with their entry/comment text. Works best when people use something that is actually representative of them as their user icon.

Here's the second of my two layouts, this one featuring a bit more to look at and adding a few more things to customize. This adds a further level of background configurability, as well as a full positionable sidebar that was cut down in my previous layout.

My third and final submission is Dear Diary. This layout features a side navigation bar from which underlined headings run across the page and fade. It also allows the user to optionally have a coloured background pattern on the top title bar.

Tranquility II is a CSS based design with tons of customizations available. I have included a few themes as well as one 'Theme' which demonstrates the ability to override the CSS and create a new layout.

This style is fairly recent, and is one I created for my own use. I'm not sure exactly where, or why, I came up with the idea of using colors to indicate the entry security, but I like the effect, a lot.

Apply Externally is another simple, flat-colour layout. It has a fixed onscreen structure which includes a side navigation bar and a scrolling content area. It's completely colour-customisable and supports the same paraphenalia as Statuesque does, with the same nod to extensibility.

This is a CSS based layout. There are lots of options to fiddle around with in the wizard, which is both good and bad because it is kind of overwhelming.

Here's a funky CSS-based design I put together. It features a rather nice sidebar design which can go on the left or right side of the page, and the tableless page structure even shows up fine (with the obligatory minor tweaks) in Windows Internet Exploder coughhackptooie.

A simple but classy CSS based design. I love CSS based designs because they tend to break much less often than table based designs.

This was the first home-grown S1 style I ever wrote. It is now my first S2 style where I've consciously written all the views rather than purely relying on code from other styles. I wanted something simple but usable and this is what I came up with.

I created this style almost a year ago. It has undergone many changes. The name is because it had a ton of <divs> in the beginning (I also have a style called 'Tablefied' - I'm obviously creative with names).

This style is built out of lines, not boxes: it uses the entire screen to display entries. The effect can be clean and efficient or sprawling and relaxed -- there are many options for customization available through the standard wizard interface, and even more open to users with a minimum of layer use.

Statuesque is a flat-colour layout featuring a curved navigation bar and curved entry boxes. It is fully colour-customisable, and supports all journal views. It also has linklist support.

It's pretty much what the name says. lol. A three-collumn style. It's not as flexible as I wish it was, but I had two extremelly busy weeks. It does have the option to add a header and a background image, though.

This style is probably different than what everyone else is making because it's not "pretty". In fact, it's very basic. The point of the style is to use it on mobile devices (such as cell phones and PDAs), because it's basically just the text and nothing fancy (and no pictures except lj user heads and such).

I created this layout because I wanted something simple and uncluttered. I was previously using Component, and while I was able to customise it significantly, I got tired of all the boxes everywhere. I wasn't too fond of any of the other layouts that existed, and so with all that I learned about S2 and CSS from customising Component, I set out to create my own layout from scratch.

This style was inspired by the colorbar memes that have circulated on LiveJournal. I enjoy working with the palimg textures and was ready to move on to automated color palettes, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to combine both.

My design, though not amazingly chic, was based more on functionality than a cool-factor. I'm a minimalist at heart, yet, this layout can range from incredibly simple to being as busy as your heart desires through the Customization area.

I create this style originally to use as a simple, black and white style that looked good without using images and was loaded quickly on any connection. For this contest, I added colour and background customisation to it, and a great deal more.

This is the first of two complimentary layouts I made (with a little of mart's help), this one targeting primarily mobile device users (such as pocket pc's) whilst also being a nice lightweight layout in its own right and the second targeted at the regular desktop user.

I created this style a long time ago (June 2002!) because I was bored and wanted to create a style purely at random. I almost submitted it as a public S1 style at the time; I didn't quite get around to doing that, but that's where the name comes from. (In order to submit it as a public style, it needed a name. For lack of a better name, I started calling it Bob, and the name... stuck.)

I was re-reading my copy of Bringhurst, and was suddenly struck by a desire to see the extent to which I could replicate decent-looking print typography in, well, my LJ. As a consequence, the themes become not sets of colours, but sets of typefaces, adding styling to the text itself.

I also wanted to see if I could create something that took better advantage of the space available on the high-resolution displays I use most of the time. To those ends, I took inspiration from a newspaper on my desk, and created Newsworthy to lay out entries in columns wherever possible.

I started writing an S2 style because I wanted a layout that could be easily modified by using CSS, and I eventually ended up with this. The layout can be changed quite a lot by overriding or extending the stylesheet. I also wanted something that could be easily customised using the wizard as well, especially when it came to colours.