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Well, I'm a bloody NOVELIST, so I'm not going to be spartan. However, I also have an attention span that would make grasshoppers feel superior, and this, combined with my unholy ability to typo in the worst possible ways (read: I will not typo normally, no "teh"ing or "btu"-ism. No, I will find a word that could be made into another word with the changing of a single letter, and typo that. Double chance if the word/sentence could be made dirty by the typo.) tends to limit my desc-ing. So generally, my descs are one-and-a-half paragraphs, the first dealing with outside appearance, visual stuff, and the half dealing with other senses - what my character smells like, any involuntary noises made, an "atmosphere" or "sixth sense" about them, that sort of thing.
The half-paragraph can be a bit dodgy, though. Presents the perfect opportunity to go ahead and do the "you feel a sense of evil emanating from her"-type stuff, but I tend to avoid that like the plague. I DO like adding those other senses, as well. They can add atmosphere to the desc that otherwise wouldn't be there. Their joints creak, they smell like metal, they're surrounded by an atmosphere of intensity, et cetera et cetera. Also, since sometimes when I'm in a rush for time or someone is RPing and typing at the speed of light (bit of a pet peeve of mine - I mull and ponder and perfect my sentences, and it's weird trying to do that while my RP-partner can type out paragraphs in a few seconds), if I skim over a description and catch those other channels of sensory input, I'm much more likely to go back and read the whole thing.
Only real drawback I've encountered is, when meeting someone or going to RP with a guy, the desc can get cumbersome. I say hi, they say hi, I look at them, they look at me, I type a line, I wait for five minutes while the other person searches for a dictionary to try and find out what the #### "interstice" means.
Generally, I tend to avoid colors in my desc, as I find it adds an air of carnival garishness to the whole thing. As said, I write fiction, and I like the words itself to bring an image to people's heads, not a giant all-caps colored sentence saying MY EYES ARE BLUE. Well, that and for the beginning part of my mudding life I used telnet, and a lot of that sort of weird black-and-white text minimalist thing has come with me, to the point that I tend to turn color off/sparse in most muds because it just seems ODD to me.
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