Hey guys
Remember LJ icons?
They were TINY. 100×100 pixels. That’s, like, digital scrimshaw. And people were obsessed with making good ones – and there were CONTESTS, super cutthroat ones, and trends would sweep the icon-making world every week or so and as soon as you mastered a technique it would be passé, and there were whole communities dedicated to tutorials and icon-making resources, and it was all its own WEIRD LITTLE WORLD.
Is there anything like that now? What do graphics-obsessed people make in the Tumblr era?
If there is one thing I miss about LJ it’s the shadow-conversations people used to have in comment threads solely with their icons. Icons had a vocabulary, and a grammar, and you had to learn it.
Gif sets: not quite used the same way.
Right! It was a whole different dynamic because you could choose which icon to post with. So it would be like “I’m wearing my Severus Snape with a Weird Al song quote mask to say this.”
FLASHBACK MAAAAAN.
For a year or two I had a paid LJ account and I remember being actively excited about the EXTRA ICON SLOTS. I would be able to express myself with a wider array of Thor and Batman reaction images!
a friend and i once had a conversation that went to, iirc, something like 6 pages of comments, just the two of us, only with out icons
100×100 pixels wasn’t scrimshaw on the monitors we were using. It was a totally reasonable percentage of screen space in the resolutions we had at the time.
@bluefall-returns you maintained a good set of these
I did. It was a useful extra layer of expression. I miss it.
Although I never made the best use of them, which was to go join an RP community. Nothing more useful for RPing than having an easy visual indicator of your current persona and their mood right next to every post. I’ve always wondered whether that was a co-evolution of some kind or just a convenient appropriation of an existing resource.