League of Legends Art Showcase Submission Didnt Go Through
Some thoughts on Anarchism's League Fanart Showcase
First of all, excellent idea — love seeing Riot promoting fan creators! — and I'm pleased they're taking feedback on the site, because it's a bit… well, early days right now. So! Some feedback.
Why am I qualified to give it? Well, I've been an artist for 16 years, I've been involved in fine art-communities for a very long time, as a user and as a moderator, and worked as a freelancer for about iv–five years at present. There are a lot of places artists can choose to share their art online, and if Riot wants to be an bonny place to go for quality League fanart, I have some thoughts that might help.
First, I go what you lot're going for with the tile layout and it looks aesthetically very nice, merely I don't dig it for browsing art for a couple of reasons.
SCROLLING & CROPPING
Oh my goodness, the scrolling. Browsing the showcase requires you to whorl and roll and ringlet and whorl and scroll and ringlet. And if you hit "reload" or shut the tab by blow you're kicked correct back up to the top of the page to curlicue and scroll and scroll and scroll again to find where you left off. Not nifty that the site inconveniences the people who scan it most extensively :/
Secondly, cropping in tiles hurts sure kinds of artwork.
Single-graphic symbol pieces like DUNK Darius and the cute Ahri in white space do just fine — but denser pieces like the Veigar or Ekko/Braum piece don't translate well to square thumbnails. Any piece that relies on aspect ratio or negative space for its impact look SIGNIFICANTLY less interesting in cropped thumbnail.
Take for example this amazing piece by kiddo428,
Or this explosive Lux piece by shenggangdong
Now look at what those pieces await like every bit thumbnails:
The Lux piece doesn't even show that she'southward in it and the whole entreatment of the epic teamfight in kiddo's art does not come across to a browsing spectator AT ALL. Automatic thumbnailing like this comes with a run a risk of cropping out the major visual draws of whatsoever slice put through it, just that risk increases exponentially at more farthermost, interesting or artistic aspect ratios. Any works that use unusual viewing angles or tilted perspectives as well suffer in automated cropping.
ARTISTS ANONYMOUS
Another problem with the seamless tile layout is it makes the artist almost ENTIRELY anonymous. Looking at the folio without mousing over anything, at that place is no context to who made what or why. Displaying a name and title natively without mouse-over would be a nice, although non essential characteristic.
Now instinctively, this makes sense as a presentation — information technology's the museum-approach: put the piece of work on display and let it speak for itself and let the audience mouse over the piece if they're interested to know who made it.
OK then Lunar Revel Veigar up there is an exception, near pieces Do take a credit on them (yous might wanna fix this i ASAP), merely the trouble is those credits don't do a very good job of spotlighting the artist. Yes, the work should speak for itself, but you believe me when I say that information technology will, and allowing the artist more than room to express themselves exterior of the work won't distract from it.
Taking 1 random example: A Halloween Over Piltover by Speeh. This is what the site'due south credits by and large expect like. A "name" which is most often an online handle and and so a link to an online gallery. This is what I would describe as "the bare minimum," which typically isn't good plenty for Riot.
One problem is that an creative person'due south name on one site ofttimes doesn't translate to some other. If Speeh has a Twitter for example it might non exist under the proper noun Speeh, nor their instagram, website or online portfolio. And if the artist should ever choose to get by a different handle, a unmarried link to a deviantART (which may too be abandoned or terminate updating) can leave works "orphaned" from the artist who created them.
This is of form a risk no matter what y'all practise, but one way to baby-sit against it is back-up: the more than links to various profiles used be an artist you take, the better the chances that at to the lowest degree ONE of them will remain active fifty-fifty years later, or will point anyone interested enough to go looking in the correct direction.
Another trouble is… who the hell is "Speeh"? Much similar a museum just shows the barest minimum about the artists whose work are on brandish ("Nude on beach", John Q. Nobody, oil on canvas), the fanart showcase offers the artists who submit their work very petty opportunity to present or promote themselves.
So, one quick photoshopping later, I've mocked up a more than comprehensive description that offers artists more opportunities to show off their skill and professionalism and plug their online presence.
All of these things should be OPTIONAL for artists to input when submitting, not mandatory, and obviously you'd need graphic symbol limits and word-filters to avert people vandalizing things.
A description allows the creative person to present the work in their own vocalisation, and comment on inspirations, ideas and creation process — thus allowing them to make themselves more personal to the viewer than a uncomplicated name-tag. Allowing input of piece of work-time and what tools were used gives the artist an opportunity to show off their skills (and for other artists, knowing what tools were used is ofttimes an interesting treat!). A piffling self-descriptive blurb helps artists self-promote as well, and a fuller range of options for plugging websites and social media would be nice, and the ability to plus commission information specifically would be HIGHLY useful for working artists.
Also, since information technology'south highly likely one artist volition end up with more than one piece in the gallery at some point, some sort of internal artist-tagging system to collect and display information technology for those interested would be practiced.
SEARCHING FOR A SEARCH FUNCTION
This just isn't practiced enough.
Oh my god this simply isn't good enough.
Now I realize it's a major brunt on data entry merely the filter functionality has to be expanded significantly and it really seriously needs to exist accompanied with a proper search function.
At the very least let searches past title and artist name — this gives people a chance, if they detect something cool in at that place but forget who made it — to go and look it upwards again.
My suggestion would be to follow in the footsteps of sites like deviantART and make it mandatory for artists to practice some of the tagging piece of work as role of the submission process. As a bare minimum, make them tag which champions are in the piece, and so have them categorize their piece into some wide categories, like for instance whether it's digital art or traditional art or mixed media. Subsequently that, I think it'd be fine to provide some optional tagging options similar analogy, comic, wallpaper, etc. though best to keep them somewhat limited to avoid spreading works too sparse beyond categories.
Secondly, delight oh Please rework the champion filtering. There are 130+ champions and if I desire to browse fanart of, say, Malzahar, I have to ringlet and scroll and scroll and scroll and coil and coil and scroll and roll and it is TREMENDOUSLY frustrating.
If I want to filter multiple champions (like, oh, say Taric and Ezreal) I take to coil and scroll and scroll and curl to find Ezreal, and so I have to click back into it AGAIN to curl and scroll and curlicue and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to find Taric.
Look, I get it, the tiled rows of champion splashes wait really squeamish and highly-seasoned, but they are a TERRIBLE browsing experience. Delight but practise an alphabetized list or a dropdown menu. These things have already been solved in web-pattern, don't overthink them.
And finally…
QUALITY… Command?
Curation is skillful. Assuasive community input is skillful. Originality is good.
Theoretically, information technology's all proficient, and then this is not so much a criticism every bit a warning. Personal anecdote time!
I spent some years equally a moderator of a Danish fine art-forum. Chore of the moderators included sifting through submissions before they got displayed on the site to filter out porn and low-quality content. We'd and so rank each submission from i–10 as a measure of "technical quality," i.e. not by whether we liked it but whether something was technically well-fabricated. Artwork would and then be sorted on the site co-ordinate to its boilerplate score after a number of ratings had been done.
What happened, though, was that VERY CONSISTENTLY, "high art", similar paintings, graphite portraits and realistic illustration, would be ranked higher than "pop art" like cartoons, anime- and manga inspired works, comics and fanart. This happened beyond the board, and very frequently "high art" piece of work that was executed with less skill and less time-investment than "popular art" would end up with a higher rating across the lath.
Now, we were a very diverse board of moderators — I work in illustration, cartoons and comics, others did paintings and realistic pencil art, notwithstanding others were did abstracts and etc — and we all had expert critical eyes and communicated plenty about standards. But as it turns out, there are cultural mores virtually what kinds of art are "high culture" and which aren't, what types of art are featherbrained and frivolous and which are meaningful, and they are more powerful than you lot think. They influence how we judge quality, they influence how we judge the "worth" of a piece. And to be honest, I recall I already see them at work in the fanart gallery.
I can't testify this with statistics or annihilation, I can only provide my personal impression, simply scrolling through the gallery, what I seem to see consistently is pieces that are:
- Highly detailed.
- In color.
- Non-narrative grapheme pieces.
- Focused on drama, tragedy, dazzler or "badassery."
Not a lot of pencil sketches in at that place, not a lot of comics, not a lot of pieces about characters goofing around, not a lot of landscape or environment pieces. Not a lot of flat-colour cel-shaded anime-mode pieces, not a lot of line drawings. Not a lot of shipping, either (Ezreal x Taric WHERE?), not fifty-fifty between confirmed couples similar Garen and Katarina, which is odd because shipping is a substantial office of fan culture, and should be celebrated equally such.
The outcome is that while the fanart gallery certainly has a lot of loftier QUALITY work, it seems to have a rather low diversity of GENRES.
Now there could be a lot of reasons for this. Remember those "high vs popular fine art" biases I mentioned? Aye. I assume that you guys at Anarchism, picked the initial batch of available works, and you've made a agglomeration of decisions based on your vision of what the Fanart Showcase should contain. That's fair enough and you lot're well within your rights to exercise and so.
The matter I'm worried most, though, is that by selecting the types of works that y'all have, you take set the expectations for what the Fanart Showcase is designed to showcase — and non only volition that discourage artists who don't work within the genres you've put on display to submit their work ("oh, I don't think the stuff I do fits with what they desire"), it will also inform the expectations of the community you'll be request to vote for new pieces in the futurity. The audience, too, will await at what types of works are represented in the gallery already, and be biased towards voting in works that look like in manner and execution. And that's ON TOP of the high vs popular art bias.
The Fanart Showcase should, I think, try as much as possible to testify the full diversity of fanart generated by the League of Legends community. The contests you're proposing might be a proficient way to inject into the showcase genres and types of work that you find are missing — I encourage you to do that!
Try to guard confronting biases that aren't based on merit, but on cultural expectations of what "proficient" looks like. Don't let loftier art crowd out pop fine art, don't allow the well-rendered oversupply out the well-realized, don't let the absurd-looking crowd out the cool ideas.
7/10, a good start.
Source: https://medium.com/@TBSkyen/some-thoughts-on-riots-league-fanart-showcase-99e6c3beacd6
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