Shoot the confetti, the OTW is turning 17 today! Since 2007 we have achieved a lot, and we’re happy to celebrate another anniversary with you. Another year has passed, full of exciting achievements and milestones, including but not limited to:

• Archive of Our Own reached 7 million users and 13 million works,
• Open Doors imported 9 fanfiction archives into Archive of Our Own,
• The number of articles on Fanlore hit 70,000,
• More than 300,000 non-English works have been added since last September,
• And 14 articles, 5 symposia, 3 book reviews, and 2 multimedia works were published on Transformative Works and Cultures!

Since it’s our birthday, we dressed up to celebrate. There is now an official OTW anniversary skin available on Archive of Our Own to mark the occasion, for a limited time only!

If you feel like dressing up your AO3 interface, you can use the anniversary skin by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking on “Happy 17th!” under the Customize section. Alternatively, you can do this by clicking on Skins in your Dashboard. You’ll see the skin under Public Site Skins.
Want to rock your own style for the occasion? Did you know that you can create your own site skin in minutes using the Skin Wizard?

To do this, go to your Dashboard and click on Skins.

Next, select Create Site Skin. Under Create Site Skin, you have the option to write custom CSS or use the Skin Wizard. For all you programmers out there, the first option could be a fun challenge! But the Skin Wizard offers a quicker and easier way to create your skin.

Once you click on Use Wizard, you’ll see many customization options. First, give your site skin a unique title. If you’d like, you can add a description as well.
Next, you can choose your font and adjust settings like font size, work margin width, and paragraph gaps. (If you’re unsure what any of these terms mean, click on the little question marks beside each option.)

After that, you get to pick your colors! You can change the background, text, header, and accent colors by typing the names or hex codes of whatever color speaks to you!

While creating your site skin, you also have the option to add parent skins. This allows you to combine and layer multiple site skins while creating your own. If you’d like to keep the default options for a specific parameter, simply leave that field empty.

Once you’re all set, click Submit and see the magic happen!

Once you submit, you have the options to preview, edit, delete, or start using the skin. When you click on Use, your skin will be applied to all pages on the Archive.

You can always edit or delete a site skin and start again if you want to do something different. The skins you create will only be visible to you.

However, in honor of the OTW’s birthday, we would love to see some of your custom skins! Take a screenshot of your AO3 page with your custom skin equipped, and share it with us on one of our social media channels!

Thank you for celebrating the OTW’s 17th anniversary with us! We wouldn’t have made it this far without the dedicated fans and hardworking volunteers. We can’t wait to see what the next year will bring, and what we will achieve together!

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.