Hey guys
Remember LJ icons?
They were TINY. 100x100 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
100x100 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.
Icons were your mood indicator, emoticon and gif rolled into one. I actually miss having multiple icons to choose from.
Ye Good Olde Days. I imagine a lot of icons are currently lost to the void even before Photbucket introduced their pay wall recently.