Thumbnail guide #9
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The guidelines are all useful, but I worry they might be a bit overwhelming and cause contributors to either not submit their manuscript at all or submit without a thumbnail.
I wonder if the following approach would be a little less intimidating: move "thumbnail guidelines" to its own document like thumbnails.md that is linked to from the main README. Each bullet point could then be a subheading making it easier to link to as well. In the main README, we say could say something like: "for advice on creating thumbnail images, please see the guidelines in thumbnails.md".
I tried to make it so that users who don't want to read a lot can still get the basic points by bolding the core message of each guideline. What if we made a page on manubot.org with these guidelines, and users could expand the details. I'm also trying to make a manubot thumbnail creator, though I don't know how useful it will end up being. I'll try to enforce as many rules programmatically as I can. The guidelines could go there.
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I also need to add a note on background colors. They should be white I think. And pngs shouldn't be transparent. |
If we have a page for a thumbnail creation / validation on manubot.org, like the screenshot shows, then I think it makes sense for these guidelines to go there. We could also use |
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@dhimmel added a couple guidelines about background colors and contrast, and also added the collapsible sections. It might take me a week or two to make the thumbnail creator (or decide it's not worth it), so I think we might as well merge this for now even if it might eventually get moved. |
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[deleted] markdown test |
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@dhimmel ready for merge |
| Select a portion of your manuscript that is interesting and unique. | ||
| Your thumbnail is not expected to accurately capture or explain what your manuscript is about. | ||
| The purpose of the thumbnail is to visually distinguish your paper from other papers, so that readers can easily remember and quickly identify it among many others. | ||
| As such, the first preference is for a unique, colorful figure, without its caption. |
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I realize this is already merged, but will the recommendation for figures without captions or manuscript context make it less obvious this is a catalog of manuscripts instead of more general projects? I like that the current thumbnails all clearly show Manubot instances with surrounding text.
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I think the context of the catalog is pretty clear, such that users will know that the figure thumbnail refers to the manuscript and not say the analysis. Perhaps this is less the case when the manuscript link is shared on social media. Perhaps surrounding text would make it more clear that the link, as represented by a preview, points to a manuscript.
Here's what our PLOS article looks like once tweeted:
I think the image without surrounding text is good. Possibly however the description could start by including "Manubot by XX et al..."
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I think it is pretty clear given that it is called a "catalog", that is starts with the description "here is a list of manuscripts", and that all of the text in each "card" is very much the title of a paper with authors.
Having text in an image, especially text that is small and unreadable, in general serves no utility. The thumbnails as they are right now are OK, but not very pleasing to look at, and are not easy to distinguish visually. The thumbnails should follow principles of good graphic/logo/even flag design, and one of them is "show don't tell". Also we wouldn't even be telling in this case because the text is too small to read.
Also if we're getting technical, the thumbnails as they are right now are a screenshot of just the manubot version of the paper, and not the external journal/preprint or github repository that we're also linking to. As I've been discussing with Daniel, the thumbnail should the representation of the whole project; an avatar.
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@dhimmel The text that shows up in those share boxes is defined by the metadata in the <head> section of the document.
We should indeed at some point either let the user specify that text, or like you said, have manubot automatically populate it with something relevant, like the paper title and authors.
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Both of you are in agreement about the catalog as a list of projects so that's okay with me.
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I think originally I made them as they for the main manubot landing page -- where I was intending to show what manubot can do (text + images + equations + tables, etc) -- and not for the catalog page.
But really they are separate concerns. We can and still should have images like the ones in the catalog right now, except maybe simplified a little bit, and showcased on the main page.
Edit*: well we kind of already do have that on the main page, but it could be more comprehensive in the features it illustrates. You sort of get images in passing when looking at unrelated topics, eg:
https://manubot.org/images/step3.png
https://manubot.org/images/interactive-3.png
https://manubot.org/images/interactive-3.png
Closes #7