# Effective Story Thumbnailing on FA



## quoting_mungo (Oct 19, 2016)

I realized this was kind of getting off-topic for the original thread, but it's some advice I think could be helpful to writers looking to make the most of posting their work on FA, so I figured I'd post it as a new thread. If you have other tips regarding effective use of FA's story thumbnails, please feel free to chip in!


Kellan Meig'h said:


> As far as my thumbnails, I couldn't find someone that would do a custom thumbnail for each chapter, paid fairly at their going rate and my hands are no longer steady enough to do artwork. That's the reason for my thumbnails.


I absolutely understand that - I'm lucky enough to be able to draw myself, and that does (unfair as it may be) help with exposure. 
You might be able to do one thing yourself to boost the effectiveness of the thumbnails you're using, though. I'm going to use one of my story thumbnails as an example:





The "art" is simple; just a white vector of a GSD's head that I threw together, and put over a gradient background. It was picked out to go with one of the major themes of the overall story, but I know there are writers on FA who just use their own avatar for the same thing, or just flat color, and it'll work fine. Beyond that, I put title, installment number (since this particular work happens to be serial), and any applicable "keywords"/themes/content warnings on there. There's not a whole lot of that since this installment mostly establishes the set-up for the rest of the overarching story; while it also has artwork that's unique to the specific story, this thumbnail I did a few years ago for a story on my and my husband's comic account might better show what those keywords might be/look like:




That one also lists word count for the story - this can help a reader looking for works of a particular scope determine whether the work is right for them. Other things that could help would be keywords like "serial"/"stand-alone" (explicitly telling people whether the work is part of a series, in case the title doesn't make that clear), or the name of the setting if you've got a few different ones you re-use. 

You can do a lot to put your own twist on the same basic concept, but I hope this helps clarify the general principle behind making what I've found to be effective story thumbnails. If you are exclusively a writer and commission someone to make you a "base" thumbnail to use for a given series or all of your written work, just make sure you're making it clear to the artist what your intended usage is, so they understand that you'll be editing the thumbnail to add text (not all artists will be okay with this - asking beforehand is a lot better than ending up with staff having to remove your thumbnails because the artist put in a complaint!).


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## Jarren (Oct 19, 2016)

Gonna say, whenever I'm looking for reading material on the site, having a thumbnail with a little descriptor, even if there is no pretty graphic, is incredibly helpful. Just the text alone sets it apart from the other masses of little grey squares that make up the bulk of story submission thumbnails. Once I get writing on a regular schedule again, I'll probably do the same sort of thing. I mean, I know how much I appreciate it.


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## Kellan Meig'h (Oct 19, 2016)

@quoting_mungo ~ Well, that advice was unexpected. thank you for the insight.

So just so others besides myself might benefit, 

How big do you initially create your thumbnails?
Do you resize them before upload or just stand back and allow FA or other sites to auto-resize on upload?
Text before or after resizing?
Just some questions that crossed my mind, since you might have spurred me to do some 'upgrades' to my submissions.


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## quoting_mungo (Oct 20, 2016)

Kellan Meig'h said:


> How big do you initially create your thumbnails?
> Do you resize them before upload or just stand back and allow FA or other sites to auto-resize on upload?


The thumbnails for Blackmail's a Bitch I've been creating at 200 pixels square, though seeing as everything in those is vectored, the size doesn't much matter until I save it for web. Ideal would be to do your final saving at the size FA displays them (currently 120 px square), as chances are whatever image software you're using is slightly better at resizing than FA's image editing library, so you'll get better results doing that. Mine are slightly bigger as I'm hoping we'll get the ability to use larger thumbnails just as artwork has soon.


Kellan Meig'h said:


> Text before or after resizing?


I'll typically do it before, but whether you want to do it before or after will depend on a few factors:

Are you using a special layer style? (An example of this would be setting layers to have drop shadows or outlines - I like to use layer strokes in a contrasting color (dark around light text, or light around dark text) to ensure text remains legible.) 
How much are you resizing your image?
How does your image editing software handle resizing of text?
Basically, in an image editor like Photoshop, text and layer styles are vector-based, so will resize pretty much arbitrarily without quality loss. Sometimes, if your text is very large or very small, or if you're using a font that's very thin or has lots of details, you may also want to test different text modes (I may not be using the correct term here - I don't have Photoshop readily available at the moment to check - but I know in Photoshop you can set text to e.g. "crisp" or "strong", and there's not any universal answer to which text mode will work best, so if you're using Photoshop I recommend playing around with it and seeing what works best for what you're doing).

This also means that depending on how thick you want layer strokes, if you're using them, you're going to either want to resize the "original", or resize a flattened copy when you create your final web graphic. Photoshop will only use integers in determining how thick layer strokes should be, which means sometimes when resizing the text will end up with disproportionately thick strokes around it if you're only resizing the original file. In these cases, sometimes you'll want to use a flattened copy for your final resizing, in order to get fractional-thickness strokes.

That's all assuming you're using a somewhat advanced editor like Photoshop; if your editor doesn't resize text as vectors, you'll not want to resize it too much. Also depends on whether your software anti-aliases text. (If it doesn't, resizing down by maybe 5% can improve the look of your text, but that's another one of those "experiment and see what works best in the software you use" things.)

Also, you should avoid using red, and particularly bright "pure" red, as much as possible, especially if you upload a version of your thumbnail that FA will be resizing at all, as red is pretty much the color that reacts worst with jpg artifacting, which will adversely impact the legibility of your text. (Says I, while my first example does use red - but you can basically see that it's impacted how crisp the text outline looks against the white silhouette. And that's a darker red, which still works a lot better than *bright red*.)


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## Vandisar (Nov 22, 2016)

This was crazy helpful. Thank you for posting it!


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## Kellan Meig'h (Dec 6, 2016)

Just a follow-up - I'm still working on this but I have to admit; I am not an expert on working with digital media. So far, I have determined some fonts don't work for $h!t and color/contrast is everything.

Oh well, back to learning how to use Gimp.


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## quoting_mungo (Dec 14, 2016)

Kellan Meig'h said:


> Just a follow-up - I'm still working on this but I have to admit; I am not an expert on working with digital media. So far, I have determined some fonts don't work for $h!t and color/contrast is everything.


You're absolutely right; I recently went back and revised my thumbnails for _Blackmail's a Bitch_ when I realized there were some tricks I could pull to make the keywords easier to read by eliminating the thinner, lower-contrast/higher-artifact outline of the text over the dog silhouette. 




Reds are an absolute pain and I really don't advise using them if you can avoid it. (I really need to take my own advice there!) 

Best option is to select a "clean" font that's legible in small sizes; sans-serifs are generally better for that than serif fonts. Unless you're going for a very specific effect I'd stay away from novelty and "handwriting" fonts entirely. As maligned as it is, Comic Sans wouldn't be the worst choice, though a nice clean sans-serif like Arial or Verdana (you might need to use semi-bold or bold font weight with some of them, depending on how thin they are) is probably a better first choice. As long as you're creating your thumbnail at "final" size (the size it'll be appearing on the site, so 120x120 pixels at present), some "pixel" fonts may also work well, though I wouldn't want to try resizing those.


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