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 art-communities for a very long time, as a user and as a moderator, and worked as a freelancer for about 4–5 years now. There are a lot of places artists can choose to share their art online, and if Riot wants to be an attractive place to go for quality League fanart, I have some thoughts that might help.
First, I get what you’re going for with the tile layout and it looks aesthetically very nice, but 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 scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. And if you hit “reload” or close the tab by accident you’re kicked right back up to the top of the page to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll again to find where you left off. Not great that the site inconveniences the people who browse it most extensively :/
Secondly, cropping in tiles hurts certain kinds of artwork.
Single-character 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 instance this amazing piece by kiddo428,
Or this explosive Lux piece by shenggangdong
Now look at what those pieces look like as thumbnails:
The Lux piece doesn’t even show that she’s in it and the whole appeal 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 risk of cropping out the major visual draws of any piece put through it, but that risk increases exponentially at more extreme, interesting or creative aspect ratios. Any works that use unusual viewing angles or tilted perspectives also suffer in automated cropping.
ARTISTS ANONYMOUS
Another problem with the seamless tile layout is it makes the artist almost ENTIRELY anonymous. Looking at the page without mousing over anything, there is no context to who made what or why. Displaying a name and title natively without mouse-over would be a nice, although not essential feature.
Now instinctively, this makes sense as a presentation — it’s the museum-approach: put the 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 so Lunar Revel Veigar up there is an exception, most pieces DO have a credit on them (you might wanna fix this one ASAP), but the problem 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 it will, and allowing the artist more room to express themselves outside of the work won’t distract from it.
Taking one random example: A Halloween Over Piltover by Speeh. This is what the site’s credits mostly look like. A “name” which is most often an online handle and then a link to an online gallery. This is what I would describe as “the bare minimum,” which typically isn’t good enough for Riot.
One problem is that an artist’s name on one site often doesn’t translate to another. If Speeh has a Twitter for instance it might not be under the name Speeh, nor their instagram, website or online portfolio. And if the artist should ever choose to go by a different handle, a single link to a deviantART (which may also be abandoned or cease updating) can leave works “orphaned” from the artist who created them.
This is of course a risk no matter what you do, but one way to guard against it is redundancy: the more links to various profiles used be an artist you have, the better the chances that at least ONE of them will remain active even years later, or will point anyone interested enough to go looking in the right direction.
Another problem is… who the hell is “Speeh”? Much like a museum only shows the barest minimum about the artists whose work are on display (“Nude on beach”, John Q. Nobody, oil on canvas), the fanart showcase offers the artists who submit their work very little opportunity to present or promote themselves.
So, one quick photoshopping later, I’ve mocked up a more 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 character limits and word-filters to avoid people vandalizing things.
A description allows the artist to present the work in their own voice, and comment on inspirations, ideas and creation process — thus allowing them to make themselves more personal to the viewer than a simple name-tag. Allowing input 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 often an interesting treat!). A little 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 it’s highly likely one artist will end up with more than one piece in the gallery at some point, some sort of internal artist-tagging system to collect and display it for those interested would be good.
SEARCHING FOR A SEARCH FUNCTION
This simply isn’t good enough.
Oh my god this simply isn’t good enough.
Now I realize it’s a major burden on data entry but the filter functionality has to be expanded significantly and it really seriously needs to be accompanied with a proper search function.
At the very least allow searches by title and artist name — this gives people a chance, if they find something cool in there but forget who made it — to go and look it up again.
My suggestion would be to follow in the footsteps of sites like deviantART and make it mandatory for artists to do some of the tagging work as part of the submission process. As a bare minimum, make them tag which champions are in the piece, and then have them categorize their piece into some wide categories, like for instance whether it’s digital art or traditional art or mixed media. After that, I think it’d be fine to provide some optional tagging options like illustration, comic, wallpaper, etc. though best to keep them somewhat limited to avoid spreading works too thin across categories.
Secondly, please oh PLEASE rework the champion filtering. There are 130+ champions and if I want to browse fanart of, say, Malzahar, I have to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and it is TREMENDOUSLY frustrating.
If I want to filter multiple champions (like, oh, say Taric and Ezreal) I have to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to find Ezreal, and then I have to click back into it AGAIN to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to find Taric.
Look, I get it, the tiled rows of champion splashes look really nice and appealing, but they are a TERRIBLE browsing experience. Please just do an alphabetized list or a dropdown menu. These things have already been solved in web-design, don’t overthink them.
And finally…
QUALITY… CONTROL?
Curation is good. Allowing community input is good. Originality is good.
Theoretically, it’s all good, so this is not so much a criticism as a warning. Personal anecdote time!
I spent some years as a moderator of a Danish art-forum. Job of the moderators included sifting through submissions before they got displayed on the site to filter out porn and low-quality content. We’d then rank each submission from 1–10 as a measure of “technical quality,” i.e. not by whether we liked it but whether something was technically well-made. Artwork would then be sorted on the site according to its average score after a number of ratings had been done.
What happened, though, was that VERY CONSISTENTLY, “high art”, like 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 across the board, and very often “high art” work that was executed with less skill and less time-investment than “pop art” would end up with a higher rating across the board.
Now, we were a very diverse board of moderators — I work in illustration, cartoons and comics, others did paintings and realistic pencil art, still others were did abstracts and etc — and we all had good critical eyes and communicated plenty about standards. But as it turns out, there are cultural mores about what kinds of art are “high culture” and which aren’t, what types of art are silly and frivolous and which are meaningful, and they are more powerful than you think. They influence how we judge quality, they influence how we judge the “worth” of a piece. And to be honest, I think I already see them at work in the fanart gallery.
I can’t prove this with statistics or anything, I can only provide my personal impression, but scrolling through the gallery, what I seem to see consistently is pieces that are:
- Highly detailed.
- In color.
- Non-narrative character pieces.
- Focused on drama, tragedy, beauty or “badassery.”
Not a lot of pencil sketches in there, 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-color cel-shaded anime-style pieces, not a lot of line drawings. Not a lot of shipping, either (Ezreal x Taric WHERE?), not even between confirmed couples like Garen and Katarina, which is odd because shipping is a substantial part of fan culture, and should be celebrated as such.
The outcome is that while the fanart gallery certainly has a lot of high 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 pop art” biases I mentioned? Yeah. I assume that you guys at Riot, picked the initial batch of available works, and you’ve made a bunch of decisions based on your vision of what the Fanart Showcase should contain. That’s fair enough and you’re well within your rights to do so.
The thing I’m worried about, though, is that by selecting the types of works that you have, you have set the expectations for what the Fanart Showcase is designed to showcase — and not only will 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 want”), it will also inform the expectations of the community you’ll be asking to vote for new pieces in the future. The audience, too, will look at what types of works are represented in the gallery already, and be biased towards voting in works that look similar in style and execution. And that’s ON TOP of the high vs pop art bias.
The Fanart Showcase should, I think, try as much as possible to show the full diversity of fanart generated by the League of Legends community. The contests you’re proposing might be a good 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 against biases that aren’t based on merit, but on cultural expectations of what “good” looks like. Don’t let high art crowd out pop art, don’t let the well-rendered crowd out the well-realized, don’t let the cool-looking crowd out the cool ideas.
7/10, a good start.
