Admin Post: Welcome to Mood Theme in a Year!

[soc_puppet]

Mood Theme in a Year is a low-pressure community dedicated to creating a custom mood theme. Anyone is free to join or leave at any time, and make as many or as few mood theme graphics as they'd like. Sharing is encouraged, as is asking for help and cheering one another on.

Despite the name, there are three main schedules for this community:

The Maximum Mood Theme Track, which begins on January 1st and continues through the year with regular breaks

The Minimum Mood Theme track, which starts seven times a year and goes for six weeks at a time

The Medium Mood Theme track, which starts three times a year and goes for fifteen weeks at a time, with one break in the middle

Mood prompt posting will begin on January 1st and continue through the year. The Maximum track will include all 132 moods; the Minimum Track will include the bare minimum 15 moods for a complete mood theme, plus an optional three moods that will give you the greatest image variety in your mood theme for the fewest actual images; the Medium Track includes all 34 higher-level moods that other moods inherit images from.

Roughly three of Dreamwidth's "moods" will be prompted each week for each track. The Maximum and Medium Tracks have a week-long break scheduled every seventh week. These breaks can be used to catch up on moods you missed, re-do moods you're not satisfied with, get a head start on future moods, work on uploading your custom mood theme, or really to just take a break. Rest is important too, after all!

Additionally, the prompted moods are just suggestions; you can work on the moods in any order you wish. While the order of all tracks is based on the mood hierarchy tree, starting with the mandatory moods and then moving on to the mid-level "branch" moods, participants are welcome to join in or leave at any time. Anyone looking for a particular challenge is welcome to check out the Mood Theme in a Month calendars, with a goal of completing at least one mood image per day to cover all of the Medium Moods! Or, if Bingo is more your style, here's a couple of Bingo cards to cover either all the Minimum Moods plus one, or most of the Medium Moods.

To check out the mood theme schedule, click here.
To manage your mood themes (including uploading a new one), click here.
To find out what it takes to submit a mood theme to be used by Dreamwidth and available to free users, click here.

Comments

[yhlee]

So cool, looking forward! :D

Honestly it's also occurred to me that this would be an interesting way to piggyback an expression sheet for character design too!

[soc_puppet]

Oh shoot, I love that idea! I think I may suggest it when I advertise this comm elsewhere.

[green_wing]

Gosh, I haven’t made a mood theme in such a long time 😺
I might just have to sign up for this *ponders a subject* 🤔

[soc_puppet]

I would certainly welcome someone who has any experience with making mood themes 😂 I've never done it myself, which is going to add a layer of challenge to running this community 😅

[green_wing]

*LOL* well, I haven't made one for about 15 years, and I don't know if DW mood theme making is the same as LJ mood them making, I'll have to have a look around and see if they're similar enough that I can be of help ;)

[green_wing]

I’m just re-familiarising myself with the whole process and seeing which of my custom ones are still active 😹

Looks like photobucketassholes already killed one account 🤦‍♀️

I’ll be here if anyone wants to ask questions tho, and I’ll help out in any way I can 👍

[soc_puppet]

Sounds great!

Ah, Photobucket; I miss when it was actually a good, useful service.

Here's a potentially tricky one for you: I've picked up from the tutorials I linked in the community profile that mood images can be 100x100 pixels, which is bigger than I thought; official DW-provided mood themes seem to cap out at 50x50! I'd still like to know the maximum file size, though, for anyone who wants to make animated mood themes. If that's not one you know, though, no worries; I don't think it's likely to be one we run into, since the community is still pretty small.

[green_wing]

That’s interesting, in all the time I’ve been making them (admittedly I haven’t made one for about ten years) the size was always 100x500?

They must have increased it to icon size at some point 🤔🧐

[kossai]

only join dreamwidth in september with closure of previous social media of choice ( cohost ) - still OK to share mood theme progress , even if not on topic for current weeks ? :)

[soc_puppet]

Absolutely! You can share your progress whenever you like; back when this community was first starting, a number of people would share their progress weekly, and I tend to share complete parts during break weeks (like this week), but honestly that's pretty arbitrary. Really, there's only a mood schedule because I felt like it would be easier for a lot of people to have a structure to work off of, so working in whatever order you like is fully encouraged as well! And since you don't have to create a mood theme in any particular order, sharing what you have at any point in time makes perfect sense, IMO.

Anyway, welcome aboard! I'm looking forward to seeing your mood theme 😊

[kossai]

alright ! really appreciate answer , and kindness :)