My patience is wearing thin on this one. There’s a new image editor called Acorn, and it looks pretty cool. So I click on one of the screenshot thumbnails in the lower-right of the home page. And then it happened. The sky turned black, the lights went out, and a giant gleaming polaroid slammed me in the face. That’s right, I got lightboxed.

Here’s a time lapse of my experience on the Acorn site:

You know what that looks like? A strobe light. And it felt like one too.

There’s more than the headache. Lightboxing kills context, and worse, it kills personality. Every image in every lightbox is the same, floating in the same generic universe, cut off and disconnected from your site, your style, and your design.

So next time, save us the eye strain and think twice before you start playing with the lightswitch.