Shirt.Woot

Seems like there are a lot more showing up, but I've got to tell you, on my computer, they're broken. Only the top left corner animates and the rest stays still. Or at least, that's what they look like before I click to see the larger image. After I click, I see what the artist intended, but before it's just odd and sort of ugly.

Anyone else seeing that? Anyone care? Anyone annoyed?

HalfWheat wrote:Seems like there are a lot more showing up, but I've got to tell you, on my computer, they're broken. Only the top left corner animates and the rest stays still. Or at least, that's what they look like before I click to see the larger image. After I click, I see what the artist intended, but before it's just odd and sort of ugly.

Anyone else seeing that? Anyone care? Anyone annoyed?

I do not have the issue you do, but I am still not a fan of them. I think they are quite distracting on the derby page. They tend to have the opposite effect than what I'm sure was intended on my voting behavior.

taternuggets wrote:I do not have the issue you do, but I am still not a fan of them. I think they are quite distracting on the derby page. They tend to have the opposite effect than what I'm sure was intended on my voting behavior.

Same here--I'd like to see animations banned from the detail pictures. I find them far more distracting than the artist logos that aren't allowed any more.

I have mixed feelings about the use of animated thumbnails.

Pros:

You can show more of the design in the limited space. Sometimes a thumbnail just doesn't capture the full design adequately. For example this derby entry is nicely done but the thumbnail doesn't really do the design justice.

You can add a bit of visual interest and fun to the thumbnail. Walmazan has been doing this tastefully and wonderfully for quite sometime.

Cons:

You can make your thumbnail look like a horrible banner ad from the late 90s. Several thumbnails this week are extremely guilty of this. I'm afraid the thumb nail for my graphite design flirts with committing this sin, but I also didn't feel I could capture the design well with just a single part of it.

HalfWheat wrote:Seems like there are a lot more showing up, but I've got to tell you, on my computer, they're broken. Only the top left corner animates and the rest stays still. Or at least, that's what they look like before I click to see the larger image. After I click, I see what the artist intended, but before it's just odd and sort of ugly.

Anyone else seeing that? Anyone care? Anyone annoyed?

I'm seeing the same problem for most of the animated thumbs. It looks messy and I'd like to see them banned as well.

As far as not being able to fit enough of the design in the thumb to make people want to click, I say, too bad. Nearly every design that has printed has done so without an animated thumb. Try to be more creative with your thumb, pick a spot to highlight or just forget about it. The animations look "myspace trashy" and they need to go.

Im not a fan of them either. Woot's derby page already has some load problems now and then, especially when there's a ton of entries. The gifs make things harder to load, and add to the busyness of the page.

You can always animate your signature banner to promote the design. That is far less harsh on the derby's load time, and it also catches people's attention in the main thread.

Animated thumbnails really POP.
They make great use of negative space.
The sketchy lines are very fitting.
What were we talking about again?

bassanimation wrote:Im not a fan of them either. Woot's derby page already has some load problems now and then, especially when there's a ton of entries. The gifs make things harder to load, and add to the busyness of the page.

I highly doubt animated .gifs contribute to Woots poor load times. The fact that the thumbnails are dynamically resized to 120 x 120 rather than having two different sizes of thumbnails is probably a biggest problem. With the current set up you're downloading approximately 4x times more data than what is displayed. The fact that the design detail is allowed to be 500k is ridiculous.

Looking at the top 20 derby entries (ranked by vote) at the time of writing this, the biggest file (a static .jpg) is 102.58 kb, and the smallest file (a static .gif) is 10.37 kb. Assuming a normal statistical distribution of file sizes, the typical thumbnail is between 24 and 73 kb. The animated .gif I used for my graphite design is 74.8 kb and can be optimized 61.1 kb, so it's unlikely animated files are gumming up the works or would gum up the works if they became super prevalent.

Rather than ban them, I would suggest limiting the thumbnail file size to 100 or 75 kb. This will prevent people from doing massive movies, but still permit more subtle animation to be created.

The detail image ought to show a bit of what's on the shirt. If the shirt itself ain't animated, then neither should the detail image be animated.

It's all Walzaman's fault. He does a wonderful tutorial on how to make a Gif and BOOM!!!! woot is flooded with them.

Wence would make a great teacher since that tutorial was in Spanish, and even though mi español es malo, I still understood it and so did many others it looks like ...at least I think that was the one in spanish...

chumpmagic wrote:It's all Walzaman's fault. He does a wonderful tutorial on how to make a Gif and BOOM!!!! woot is flooded with them.

Wence would make a great teacher since that tutorial was in Spanish, and even though mi español es malo, I still understood it and so did many others it looks like ...at least I think that was the one in spanish...

hyuk, I kinda was thinking the same thing. Wences did a great tutorial and posted it up here. It seemed like within the next two weeks dozens of wooters were doing animated gifs in their sig line or derby entry.

He is good teacher, perhaps a little too good. All in all though, I don't mind it. I know that Walmazan did it first and think it's cute that he inadvertenly spawned imitators.

The animated thumbnails are always broken and glitchy for me too (Firefox 3.6.x). I'd rather people animate their signatures instead, not because it's distracting, although it is a bit, but because I can't tell what I'm looking at and I'm actually less likely to check out the design.

If there´s one thing we could blame Walmazan is for making really good animated thumbnails. The problem is that not everyone has his talent, so, for me, most people that chose to use them are doing more harm than good to their designs. But, my view on them is more or less the same I have regarding using text or any kind of symbols on the thumbnail. If a thumbnail not matching the design is grounds for rejection, the only think that should be allowed is the design itself or a detail view.

Lagbert wrote:
You can make your thumbnail look like a horrible banner ad from the late 90s.

This is already happening.

Add me to the list of people who find them annoying. If your design has to be animated to appeal, it doesn't work on a shirt.

I was just going to post about animated gifs but it looks like people are feeling the same way as I am. I know there was a push to remove excess text from the thumbs. Can we get rid of the gifs too?

Spiritgreen wrote:I can't tell what I'm looking at and I'm actually less likely to check out the design.

This exactly. Often I will pass up looking at designs with animated thumbs, even on Threadless. (actually, especially on Threadless...) I too feel like someone's just trying to yank my chain rather than show me their art . That's what I want to see, not how well they can use ImageReady. (people still use that, right?) :X

chunkydesign wrote:The problem is that not everyone has his talent, so,

DING DING DING

I have a rule at threadless. I don't care about animated thumbnails there, because generally I score one after another, and never see the thumbnails because the next tee is pulled up immediately after. However, if your presentation is needlessly annoying, your score goes down. If I need to click a button just to see ANY part of your design, you get a zero. If you have detail views to click, fine, but I shouldn't need to press start like I'm watching a flash video from the late 90s. If there is sound, your chances of a zero skyrocket depending on the length of the sound. If there is a small flash film preceding your design, you get a big ol' zero for wasting my time. If your sub is pointlessly difficult to navigate, I score you on what I can easily see.

Simply put, I want to see an amazing TEE. This isn't the Oscars. You're not going to win "best cinematography in a forum post or submission". On a site where one can vote purely from a thumbnail, it creates undue distraction. But more importantly, gimmicks tend to mask a lack of talent. When you're the only one doing something, it sets you apart. When a bunch of other people copy you, well, you know what they say about a copy always being lower quality than the original.

All of them are broken for me. =/

Up until this week I would have said the animations are fine but now it's getting distracting enough that it's hard to browse the page.

AdderXYU wrote: You're not going to win "best cinematography in a forum post or submission".

lol'ed. hard.

I don't like the animations, in fact I don't like any funny business in the thumbnails, as I argued a few weeks ago wanting to see ALL customization gone from them. IMHO they should be uniform and direct. A teaser or detail of the design within, not advertisement.

Artists have PLENTY of room to be creative in the design itself and their forum signatures, I don't see why voting mechanics should be subjected to that stuff.

I noticed one where only the corner was working, but the only reason I noticed it was because I had never noticed them moving before. Needless to say, they don't much bother me.

I would hope that the artists consider this thread and rethink the animations. A good number of people say they're broken and most of the rest don't like them. Walmazan's first animation was subtle. A winking eye on one character, I think. Now some of are full-fledged movies. What's next? Sound effects?

I would think that part of the contest is the creating a compelling thumbnail. Is it going to be the complete story of the design? No. It doesn't have to be. But it should be enough of a tease to get people to click through and see the whole design.

I don't mind the animations in signatures. One at a time like that, they're fine. But when they're all blinking on the derby page, I want to play whack-a-mole with them.

I get that artists want their designs noticed, but this doesn't seem to be working very well. Seriously, on some of them, I can't even make out what the design is supposed to be about.

Having had to look at my scrolling graphite thumbnail for the last 4 days, I will readily agree, I took that one too far. If I decide to do any animations in the future, I will definitely go a more subtle route.

As a side note: A lot of the issues people are describing can probably be fixed by updating their browsers. Firefox's speed and stability have greatly improved over the last year, and anything newer than IE6 is going to be a major improvement.

Another side note: I want to challenge designers to keep thumbnails under 30K. That will help load times on the main derby page a ton.

tgentry wrote:Yep, we agree. They're annoying and often don't load properly. As of the next derby animated gifs are banned in thumbnails, along with all messages and logos.

HOORAY!!

tgentry wrote:people have proven they don't know where tasteful stops and annoying begins.

Wondering who's going to be the first enterprising soul (kind way of saying something else) who subs an animated 580 comp...

tgentry wrote:Just adjusted my post to give this "enterprising" person no excuse. Still no animated gifs in detail image.

SkekTek wrote:

Strangely hypnotic.

tgentry wrote:I will be sad not see your awesome gifs in the thumbnails anymore, Walmazan, but they're still more than welcome in your signature.

tgentry wrote:Yep, we agree. They're annoying and often don't load properly. As of the next derby animated gifs are banned in thumbnails, along with all messages and logos.

From here on out your entry thumbnails have to be a clean representation of the artwork. No "click here" or "vote for me" messages, no artist logos, and no animated gifs. We would have liked to leave the option open for tasteful versions of the above, but we simply don't want to police it and people have proven they don't know where tasteful stops and annoying begins. Hence the outright ban to make it easy for everyone.

You can still add your own non-animated touches to the 580x580 detail images (as long as we can still clearly see the art and what color shirt we're voting on) and you can still use tasteful and functional animated gifs in your signature.

We'll be putting this notice in the derby announcements for at least the next few weeks, and feel free to get the word out. I'm sure a few artists will learn about the change the hard way, but that's unavoidable.

Amen! Now maybe my seizures will stop. Walmazan, I still want to see your cute animations in your signature!

tgentry wrote:Yep, we agree. They're annoying and often don't load properly. As of the next derby animated gifs are banned in thumbnails, along with all messages and logos.

From here on out your entry thumbnails have to be a clean representation of the artwork. No "click here" or "vote for me" messages, no artist logos, and no animated gifs. We would have liked to leave the option open for tasteful versions of the above, but we simply don't want to police it and people have proven they don't know where tasteful stops and annoying begins. Hence the outright ban to make it easy for everyone.

You can still add your own non-animated touches to the 580x580 detail images (as long as we can still clearly see the art and what color shirt we're voting on) and you can still use tasteful and functional animated gifs in your signature.

We'll be putting this notice in the derby announcements for at least the next few weeks, and feel free to get the word out. I'm sure a few artists will learn about the change the hard way, but that's unavoidable.

HOOOORAAYY!!!

*happy dance*

Yay! I agree with the general sentiment in that most animations are a) annoying b) slow down load times c) don't always work and d) make me feel like the artist is trying to overcompensate for something. Not all, certainly, but most.