Styles and Design Getting Started

Welcome to styles and design!

Styles and Design Areas

Here are the kinds of tasks someone can do in styles and design:

• Designing system styles
• Designing styles to share with others
• Assisting others with their styles
• Creating public mood themes
• Testing and revising draft styles in dreamscapes
• Converting submitted CSS styles in dreamscapes to S2 themes
• Developing S2's capabilities and backend work, like adding modules
• Documentation

Places to collaborate or get help

• The official styles community, where you can read announcements from the team and ask questions, is dw_styles.
• The official community for submitting styles for consideration to be included in the system is dreamscapes. You can go there and submit drafts of intended system styles you'd like help with, and you can also help out others with their styles.
• There are also some auxillary help communities: style_system and layoutmakers. These are appropriate places to ask questions about the style system and share resources.
• You can find tools to help you develop Dreamwidth styles at the_style_kit.
• We currently know of two established communities for sharing styles: dreamwidthlayouts and mintyapple.
• The IRC channel #dw_styles is available for real time communication and you can often find styles team members there; for more information on using IRC, see the IRC and IRC help wiki pages.
• Here is a list of style bugs on Bugzilla; you can read more on doing development in particular on Dev Getting Started.

Current documentation

S2

Currently, the S2 documentation is kind of sad and out of shape.

• LJ's old S2 docs -- these have some useful information.
• There is also an S2 Category of pages, but not very comprehensive or enlightening yet.
• People already familiar with S2 might be able to glean things from the core2.s2 code.
• People familiar with S2 and Perl might be able to glean more from the S2.pm code.

CSS

We currently have a little help for S2's CSS available here:

• S2 CSS -- a listing of the current DW specific CSS classes for layouts

For exploring CSS, we also recommend the following extensions:

• Firebug
• Web Developer

Other resources

CSS

Here are some useful resources for CSS:

• CSS 2.1 Specification
• CSS Zen Garden has a resources list
• A List Apart CSS articles

Color scheming

Here are some useful tools for making color schemes:

• ColourLovers's Copaso
• Color Scheme Designer
• 4096 Color Wheel
• Color Palette Generator
• Color Schemer 2.0
• Colr
• Kuler

Stock images

Here are some places that have stock images:

• Creative Commons image search
• Stock.XHNG