DeviantArt Eclipse redesign destroys custom profiles, journal skins, and group data AI-researched
Dependency: DeviantArt platform (classic layout) Wikipedia
DeviantArt's forced migration to the 'Eclipse' redesign permanently eliminated custom CSS profile skins, journal skins, custom widgets, group data, and numerous community features — destroying years of user-created visual design work that had made DeviantArt profiles a medium of digital art in themselves.
Fixes & Mitigations
- No fix available: Custom CSS profile skins and journal skins were permanently discontinued. No migration path or export tool was provided for the visual design work embedded in these customizations.
- No fix available: Group data including featured folders, notes, admin forums, announcements, statistics, and comment histories were deleted during group migrations to the new layout.
In 2019, DeviantArt began rolling out “Eclipse,” a complete redesign of the platform. On May 20, 2020, the classic layout was permanently retired and all users were forced onto Eclipse, which lacked support for many features that had defined the platform for over a decade.
What changed
DeviantArt had long allowed users to customize their profile pages and journal entries with custom CSS skins — a feature that turned profiles into expressive works of digital art in their own right. Thousands of artists had created elaborate, visually distinctive profile designs and journal templates, many of which were shared, remixed, and treated as creative works within the community.
Eclipse eliminated custom CSS profiles and journal skins entirely. The new layout imposed a uniform design with no mechanism to preserve or migrate the visual customizations users had built. Years of design work — both on individual profiles and in the ecosystem of shared journal skin templates — was rendered permanently inaccessible.
The damage extended beyond cosmetic customization. During group migrations to Eclipse, all data in featured folders was lost. Group notes and message histories were deleted. Admin forums and announcements were erased. Statistics including favorites, comment counts, and badges were wiped, leaving only view counts. Custom widgets, countdown timers, and group affiliations disappeared.
For many artists who had been on DeviantArt since the early 2000s, the Eclipse migration destroyed not just individual design work but the visual culture of an entire community — a culture built on the premise that your DeviantArt profile was itself a canvas.
Notes
The Eclipse migration echoed the MySpace 2013 redesign in its pattern: a platform redesign that treated user customization as disposable legacy code rather than user-created content with independent value. Unlike a platform shutdown, the content hosted on DeviantArt (uploaded artwork files) largely survived — but the creative layer built on top of the platform’s customization features was permanently erased.