Hi, I've been playing with the site skins on AO3 because I love dark themes but I just didn't find one that I like. So I started exploring how to make my own theme and created a few adaptations of my favorite desktop (Gnome GTK) and text editor themes. They are free to use for everyone, no asking required (credits for the color palettes go to the GTK Themes Abyss and Matcha aswell as the Monokai project).
If anyone has any questions on how to apply skins or make your own, feel free to ask. You can also contact me on my main profile: @judithmactir
Tutorial on how to change the site skin on AO3 below the cut ↓
Step 1:
Select "Skins" on the left side of your dashboard.
Step 2:
Choose "Create Site Skin" on the top right (don't worry it's private. AO3 removed the option of public skins. This is just for you).
Step 3:
Fill out the required information (Title must be unique, but won't be seen by anyone) and copy the whole code into the "CSS" box. Then "submit".
Step 4:
You'll be forwarded to an overview page where you see the whole code. Scroll all the way down and apply the skin by pressing the "Use" button.
Chapters: 8/8
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: Ao3 skins
Summary:
I've been posting my custom AO3 skins on my Tumblr sideblog @judithonlinux and decided it might be a good idea to put them all in one spot here, because that's where it should be anyways. I couldn't find any tags for this, so if there's a tag that I missed, please let me know.
For a tutorial on how to change your site skin, please check out this Tumblr post.
If you're interested to adapting the colors or make your own, simple AO3 site skin based on my templates, you can find an easy to follow description in this post.
I've been updating my theme posts and added the theme colors as hex codes separately to the posts. That should make it easier for anyone who wants to use them as templates to create their own themes.
So if you want to change them, all you have to do is:
Copy the whole theme code into a text editor that has a find&replace function (any editor should have that)
Look up the five color codes at any hex color picker and select the hex code of the color you want to replace it with
Use find&replace to change the occurrences of all the colors in the theme code