ratcreature | so how do you do fanart headers?

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so how do you do fanart headers?

I've been browsing a couple of the VVC related discussion posts, and the parts about labelling vids made me wonder about similar problems for fanart. I like useful and detailed content labels (anyone who has seen my delicious account could have guessed that *g*) to help fans find what they like and avoid what they don't like. And I think for non-narrative fanart the "spoiling the plot twists" aspects of detailed labels are mostly moot since you see it all at once anyway, but instead there is the problem to balance the usefulness of the preview thumbnail against avoiding things that may look disturbing even when reduced to a tiny size.

Mostly I want the header/outside of the cut to attract viewers to click on the full thing, and make it so that the labels are most useful for the potential audience. Having a small but still interesting preview is essential for that, IMO. I don't mind giving much information in text, but I like to show the part I consider best and/or most suited to size-reduction in my preview as a teaser.

OTOH I wouldn't want someone have an unintentional goatse.cx like experience on their reading list either, and there is the consideration that to reach a wide audience it can be beneficial to keep uncut things "worksafe" so that people don't feel apprehensive to include a journal, community or blog on a regular reading list that they might check from public computers or during their lunch break as well. For example in the one art community I set up (

slothsdraw, which admittedly never gained traction) the rules ask all previews to be small and suitable for general audiences ("worksafe"), while behind cuts all kind of adult content is welcome as long as it is labelled as such, though more specific information is optional.

I myself don't draw very disturbing pictures (at least not if you don't count the occasional proportion or perspective fail as disturbing *g*), but if I did anything really extreme, while I would probably try to be careful with the preview, so that it is not too bad when seen at a small size, I would still do a preview to entice people who like the same kind of art I do. So at least in my own journal that is not subject to additional community considerations, I might not pick a "worksafe" thumbnail cut (my preview is usually a square cut of the central area of interest reduced to 120x120px) if I didn't think it represented the art the best. So my posts could be problematic, even with me using all kinds of text labels.

For example one of the few times one of my pictures actually had any kind of warnings was when I drew Roy as junkie, which was thus rated "PG" and clarified in the header that this was for "drug use", but my preview thumbnail outside already showed him depicted as drug addict with his arm with track marks and drug paraphernalia. So the text warning would have only functioned as an advance warning for people cautious enough to have turned off images when coming across the cut post, because you'd notice the image before ever reading the detailed header.

I admit that even though I set up a similar rule myself for a community (in part because it was centered around drawing practice itself, not any fannish content or topic), I dislike it when I come across previews for explicit pictures on fannish comms and notice boards where you can't really see much of anything in the preview anymore, because it is a section chosen to be safe outside the cut that isn't all that representative of the style or picture. Some of this I think is just people picking a section badly (at least for my taste), but some is an inherent problem. I mean, if you have picture that is about gory, explicit violence and the center of attention is really gross, and there is no truly non-disturbing part that is still interesting (even the daisy flower off to the side is trampled and splattered with blood from an intestine!) you end up with previews that show stuff like a bit of the stormy sky above, when the image is of a demonic zombie battlefield or whatever. That is not a very useful preview.

So how to best balance between useful previews and not wanting to ambush people with disturbing pictures? Is the small size of a preview enough, because you can't see it in detail? Do most fans who are concerned about avoiding certain pictures browse with all turned off and only see them after clicking one specifically, so that text labels work as a heads up for images too? Do you still click on fanart cuts without any image preview if it has just a text header describing it?

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As a newsletter compiler, I strongly prefer not having extreme violence, genitals and/or sexual acts in a thumbnail or otherwise outside the cut. I go through a lot of comm posts, some relevant and some not, and it can get pretty wearing after a while, even though I don't have many triggers, and I've never seen an art thumbnail that hit one of the few I do have. A blood-spattered daisy hinting at violent content would be totally fine; the intestines, not so great.

Yeah, I think when posting in communities more care needs to be taken, especially in fandom-wide comms such as noticeboards or pairing comms rather than ones that by their topic would make you guess you will run into disturbing pictures (gorefest2010 or the like). As they are shared infrastructure people choosing to subscribe pick them only by the general shared interest (well except for the poor newsletter editors who have job hazards *g*), rather than being a finegrained choice like picking a journal, and it would be rather assholeish to turn a community resource into a something of a minefield.

And I expect that for their overall fandom experience most people who may find some pictures very disturbing (or worse) will still surf with images turned on with the expectation that outide of cuts pictures won't be shock images.

I mean, both as viewer as well as poster of previews I have a strong preference that the preview actually gives a good idea what the picture is about, but in the list of considerations to balance to make sure as many fans as possible can have as good a fandom experience as possible this is obviously of a lower priority than someone being triggered into flashbacks or the like. And even lots of people just being unexpectedly and badly squicked while they were catching up with fandom events on a noticeboard is not an effect you really want when you want people to click on your art, at least not if you intend to be in fandom long term and want to build a decent reputation, rather than have the "it was a social experiment" kind of notoriety.

I like the combination of header info (like that for fanfic, with rating and warnings (blacked out) and so on) and a G or PG rated preview that gives an idea of atmosphere. My computer now is in the living room, and I have young kids... and I also sometimes browse the flist at work *looks shifty* so that's my bias. But even if the preview is just a hand clenching tightly, if the rating is NC17 and the summary is descriptive, I get the idea. I will definitely click on art with no preview if the summary is good (i.e., "Our favorite heroes -- as robots!" and not "Something I drew in math today LOL").

Yeah, I think in the end good headers are as useful for fanart as they are for fic, but artists still skip them more often than writers, or at least it seems that way to me.

I see the merit in keeping previews safe for general audiences, though I'm strongly biased against previews that don't show the important bit of the image (or at least one of the important areas, if there are several). But many don't seem to share that take, because quite frequently I see thumbnails with some bit of the image that is peripheral, even if the main focus is in no way problematic, so the cut wasn't made to keep it worksafe.

I suspect these artists may follow more a "teaser" than a "preview" philosophy, perhaps similar to the "summary" vs "blurb" approaches on fiction, but while in fiction I can see sense in not spoiling a narrative, I find it annoying if the thumbnail for say an elephant picture just shows the bushy tail tip rather than a preview showing most of the elephant. I guess the theory behind this is that the audience would be curious and wonder what the image will be and then click, but I find that just annoying.

Though even that kind of preview can give an idea of the style, which is often cumbersome to describe in words, and you're right that together with a summary description it'll give a good idea what to expect.

I've always liked

almost_clara's journal, the balance between headers and previews (which she usually makes icon-sized of a detail of the pic). For example, here, both of the previews are probably more like teasers (just one face out of a larger picture with 3 or 4 people and background) but they show the drawing style. It's maybe a matter of what part of the picture to use in a preview?

I'm an unusual case, because I browse from work with a collapsed reading page, so I see the subject line of your post and no more unless I click, in which case I see the full, uncut version. For me, it helps to have a rating or NSFW note in the subject, and that it's art, and I will tend to either click it or bookmark it to look at later, depending. Theoretically adult content warnings on posts should help, but I have several friends who've marked their entire journal as adult content, which clouds the issue.

I don't use that adult flag system, but I do try to have useful subject lines, not least because those are what automatically appears in bookmarks as title too. So to have a good subject line makes it more convenient for people to bookmark you, and if the bookmark is shared on delicious or somewhere (and the bookmarker is lazy like me and almost never edits the subject, even if it is inane) others are more likely to click.

Though now I realize that on DW/LJ I actually don't put the fandom in the subject, but just title "fanart, title" which I think started because quite often the "title" is just the character name, not an actual title, and in most cases that tells the fandom, and then I do include it in the header as the first line to be clear for people who might be unfamiliar with it. It never occurred to me that some people display the subject lines only on their reading page. Maybe I should do a subject line format that was "fanart, title (fandom, character/pairing, rating)" or the like, as you often see with fic.

Though I'm rather averse to giving the rating more prominence. I find the MPAA system useless and it doesn't coincide at all with the local ratings ideas, so it's not intuitive for me. The only reason why I use it at all in my headers is that some newsletters demand a rating, and the MPAA is the most widely recognized system in English language fandom.

I guess to put a SFW/NSFW in the subject line would be an alternative, though quite often I'm baffled over the boundaries there too. Like whether mostly clothed groping is considered "worksafe" by viewers seems to vary. And for example I once asked on my f-list whether they thought an image of two guys cuddling in bed was worksafe when I posted it, which was before I used headers, so I had no preview image and labelled the cut itself "happy Roy/Dick fluff, some nudity, but no graphic sex" to avoid surprising people who were used to me not posting anything sexual. Anyway, most seemed to think the picture was NSFW, but it would not have merited more than a PG rating if it happened on US television (at least not if the couple had been m/f).

Yeah, SFW/NSFW is probably better than a rating. As you say, it depends on your workplace for borderline cases, though I'd probably say better to label something NSFW and make someone wait until later who needn't than to label it SFW and get someone in trouble.

Yeah, with nudity/sexual content I've come to understand that any nudity that goes beyond skin allowed to be shown in public spaces in an average Western country is considered NSFW (even if it is non-sexual nudity, like say a nude portrait), and clothed sexual activity is also NSFW if it goes beyond chaste kissing or handholding so that sex involving genitals is implied at that moment or shortly down the line, even if nothing of the kind is actually visible.

What I'm unclear on with the worksafe category is whether any (non-sexual) violence or gore would make a picture NSFW in the common understanding, i.e. would a picture that would require an adult rating for violence and gore fall also be NSFW?

Again, it's very much dependent on your workplace - some places wouldn't care, other places would. So probably safest to mark it as NSFW or NSFW-ish.

See, I've always assumed that most actual workplaces frown on recreational internet usage in general, regardless of content, and any assumed tolerance may badly backfire on you anyway. I.e. that it's uncommon that a workplace has actual rules for "you are allowed to wast company time on this kind of entertainment but not on that kind" even if there is an climate of "well, nobody cares if you check a non-work website every now and then as long as the actual work gets done", so it's never actually "worksafe" to look at fannish stuff in a literal sense. So then the NSFW label seems to be mostly about the additional mainstream anti-porn attitudes, that would make it potentially much more awkward (or even reputation damaging) if it is seen by colleagues, and of course pictures are never inconspicuous like text. Though I guess similar awkwardness might follow violent pictures. ("OMG you like to look at eviscerated kittens in blood rituals??")

It's different if you're allowed to use it during your lunch hour or breaks, and depending on the company and particular team or project within a company.

I think for that kind of guess that in the end only the person who knows their own workplace policies can make, only more detailed labelling is helpful, so that the headers just say more about what to expect. That just can't be done with just a SFW label, no matter how cautious the poster tries to estimate. Much like how a general "violence" label is not all that useful to gauge whether the image may be something you'd prefer to avoid, but specifying it with additions like "realistic gore" or "cartoon violence", "sexual violence", "animal harm", "self harm" etc, together with fandom and a brief summary make choices of whether to click or to avoid much easier.

I like labels with a concrete meaning much better than fuzzy blanket labels. They give more information and if they have the possibility of spoiling an effect (though I think that's more an issue for stories) there's always the greyed out but visible with highlight coding that can be done.

Interesting question! My art all goes on dA, where it's automatically shipped to subscribers' inboxes in certain ways, so the artist doesn't get to decide how things are presented. (Preview images are the default, for instance, and if they can be turned off, it's on the viewer's end.)

My weekly-ish fanwork-roundup blog posts just tag images as "worksafe" or "NSFW" (sometimes "NSFW-ish"). But then, that's usually a matter of "is there a lot of skin showing or not". I guess I might get more specific if there were gore or explicit sex involved. I don't bother with preview images. If someone's following the blog, they probably already have a sense of what they're in for anyway.

When posting in LJ/DW communities, I tend to include an MPAA-style rating, and specific notes about the content if necessary. Still don't use preview images, though. Come to think of it, I don't think I'm in any art comms where that's the general practice.

As a viewer of other people's various art-gallery websites, I've gone back and forth over whether "preview in the form of a cropped section" versus "preview in the form of a thumbnail" is Artistic or Annoying. But then, the sites I'm thinking of tend not to have any headers at all, just blocks of preview-images without any kind of filtering. I appreciate the artisticness of cropping more when there's a text header that gives me an idea of the rest of what I'm getting into.

This holds true even when there's no disturbing content to worry about. Is that artfully cropped daisy being held by an adorably befuddled Leela, or the eight-millionth Rose Tyler? (Er, no offense to Rose fans -- who could probably use the same information, if for the opposite reason.)

So, um, to pull all this rambling together by attempting to answer your questions:

1) Text-based warnings!
2) It is for me, but I don't have triggers, so I'm not sure that helps.
3) No idea, but I don't see the downside of including text-based warnings either way.
4) All the time.

I think dA is different because they have hard limits on their content in the TOS. They don't allow porn at all, afaik, and I think have restrictions on gore, and even with allowed things you have to rate everything for mature content with their two levels for that, and that is not optional as the flags on journals. So unless someone breaks TOS there is no way you could run into a graphic rape or torture picture there. So with those service wide limits it is less risky to just browse previews.

Oooh, this is an interesting topic to bring up. Do you mind it I repeat the questioning on my own LJ? I'm curious to read more responses!

Personally, I don't do preview thumbnails unless I'm told to (ie required by a fest I'm participating in) because I think I got kneejerk tedious-feeling after years of painstakingly creating thumbnails for by old fanart website archives, lolol.

I have to say that as a fanart consumer, I do like people's preview pics for artists I'm not familiar with. If it's an artist I already know, then I decide whether or not I want to look by reading the fandom/pairing/header information.

I think people can successfully lure without having to utilize the disturbing elements of the art. There's a lot to be said for being suggestive and using a hint of drama - thumbs that use extreme close-ups on character's eyes, or other emotionally charged parts of their faces, the twitch of a particularly graceful hand, the stretch of one's neck, turn of a collarbone etc.

People are generally drawn to art about people, so using parts of a human form can be fascinating.

And if they can't use the human forms, then focusing on a well-drawn bit of bg or prop can be useful as well. A shoe, a stack of books, a window to outside...anything that evokes interest and story.

I think people who make a thumbnail of cloudy sky might just be taking bad thumbnails. I feel fairly confident that there is ALWAYS a bit of interest in an explicit artwork that can be interesting with out being explicit. But then, I really am looking at this only from the PoV of my artwork. I'd love to hear other people's opinions!

No I don't mind at all. I'm interested also. A few people have replied on the DW version of this post after metafandom linked that, but not many so far.

I find that I am much less likely to click if I don't have a preview, especially with artists I don't know, but sometimes even with familiar artists, but I really dislike the teaser school of the thumbnail. I don't mind if the full picture is cropped, because if you reduce a whole big picture to a smallish thumbnail you can't make out much of anything sometimes, but I want to see at least a good portion of a main area of interest and be able to tell what the image is. Anything less than most of a face I tend to find annoying rather than intriguing, especially these body part bits you mention. That doesn't work at all for me. Sometimes I see the bits and don't even realize what part of a human that is, and not because the art sucks, but because it's so cropped and recontextualized that my pattern recognition fails. Kind of like these riddle photos where a part of an everyday object is depicted at a huge size and you have to guess what it is. So then I get frustrated, and even if that only lasts a moment and I then decide to click to find out, that is not a good mindset to view art, that I just click because I'm frustrated that I couldn't guess the "solution".

But I think if I couldn't do a non-distressing preview, I'd just try to compensate with a better summary to entice viewers and maybe skip the picture, rather than risking to distress unsuspecting viewers. Even if you don't cause any trauma flashbacks or anything, you still don't want to badly squick lots of people while they're just catching up with a notice board, unless you are into some sort of trollish notoriety ("it was a 'social experiment' whether people would be upset by uncut puppy torture...") rather than a decent fannish reputation.

Edited 2010-07-06 23:05 (UTC)

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so how do you do fanart headers?

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