Eyesore & More

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the thing about reviving an old trend or style is that you need to find a middle ground between accuracy and accessibility.

as of late, there's been a scemo/scene/emo/sparkledog type revival. people are having a lot of fun making things obnoxious, as ""cringe"" as they can, as form of self expression.

similarly, perhaps in overlap, i've found that there's an oldweb revival in the last few years, in protest of the strange, smooth, inhospitable, and inoffensive design that dominates modern web design. everyone's heard of neocities lately. i see more and more sites using beveled tables, bright colors that clash, and comic sans (though, from experience, it was not nearly as widespread in that period as Joker or Papyrus!).

i dont think i need to say this but i think it's great that people are finding themselves in that sort of thing. i'm all for it. i want people to live genuinely in whatever way feels right to them! and i want to see how the revival changes the existing understanding of stuff like 'oldweb' and 'y2k' and 'cringe culture'.

but there is actually a major fault in the whole idea. not to say people are "going overboard" - i like when people are obnoxiously themselves - but people are forgetting that there are reasons that some elements were left in their time periods.

in one word, that is... 'accessibility'!

there are a lot of times lately that i will open a website or profile on a given site and be promptly blinded and nauseated by bright colors and movement on more than 50% of the screen. i am not entirely photosensitive, but it still stands to reason that if a website feature causes physical ill of any kind, there should, at the very least, be some ample warning that is not obfuscated by the thing it is warning about. and that's not getting into things like small, unreadable text, or whether the text itself is distinct on the page.

it's not fair. it's not nice. and i'm sure it's not easy having to figure out what line to draw between self-expression and reasonable accommodation for a theoretical user. but like. you have to think about it a little.

ultimately, you need to find a way to reconcile the idea of your favorite style being fairly harmful to a sizeable amount of websurfers. you can slow your animated graphics down. you can measure out the saturation blasts. i literally block people if they manage to make me feel ill without *saying* anything. i don't *want* to, but i *will*, because, aside from protecting myself from future sensory blasts, maybe they will notice, and think about why it went that way.

and hopefully, this helps you think about it, too: what are you aiming to do with your site layout design? is there a way you can do it without unintentionally causing a seizure in a given site visitor? you need to take care. and i hope you will.