Known Issues

"I dunno how others feel about it, but I think the auto-hide on the text under the gallery listings is unnecessary. It moves the design around and I would want to read it at a glance anyway."

Agreed. We would like to see the text all the time, too, whether the images are hidden or not. This is especially bothersome simply because you can hide the images.

We definitely like the idea behind the gallery sorting options. Are you planning to apply this graphical approach to the marketplace interface? ... 'cause you should. ^__^

Is the poll supposed to work now or not? It didn't seem to want to register my vote for the most awesomest color of all, blue.

I kinda liked the old black version better since it made everything pop out against it. The gray colors make it seem a bit more depressing, plus, in my opinion, it clashes with the orange. Perhaps just having a plain back background with the bars in gray would work better? Or white might be more dramatic too.

Mm, yes. I figured we had a lot of shows out there to make an exhaustive listing, but I also think the ones listed in the popular grouping are too little. That is to say, I don't think you should increase the number of shows represented by imgs as in the pop listing, because I agree that it would become to busy and dense. However, I would love to have a text-based listing that was represented like the alphabetical gallery section.

I understand that might take a lot of manual work if you were weeding out all the "bad" or double entries, though. There is always the search box, of course. It just seems that this method promotes the pop series getting all the attention (which they don't need, haha) and doesn't allow for easy browsing/discovery of lesser known/collected shows. Trying to find a balance there...

I think the gray is lovely. Things do "pop" more when the contrast is greater (say white/bright colors on black), but gray is still pretty close. You'd get a similar effect if the thumbs were bordered by black, but in the end members will still be editing their own display pages for the full-views.

You might be surprised. The vast majority of our traffic goes to the ~35 series listed on the popular page. Most traffic goes directly to member galleries. Only 10% of the traffic to the site comes in through the home page.

That figure needs to increase, and the best way we can do that is through making the site more friendly to search engines. That's the second reason behind the new "popular/alphabetical tag" layout.

I picked gray because I wanted a neutral color behind all these vibrant pieces of art. I can't predict what people will upload so that limits us to anything from black to white with a few accent colors to draw attention.

I'm also trying to make "destination" links yellow and all "filter" links blue.

I'm undecided as to whether I want light outlines of pencil sketches in the background. My first pass at the design had a series of rotating pencil sketches (from rs galleries) drawn in white scribbled on the "paper" background on the edges. It ended up being a little too cluttered, but maybe I can post a screenshot of the older design later.

Isn't the reason most of the traffic comes through member pages because when someone searches for "XYZ Cel" then the search engine will just bring up member pages with the most hits? I don't know how you could boost RS in those hits outside of meta tags, or overall branding/linkage to RS in the galleries (Say, like DA).

Grey is a good neutral. White would be too bland and bright (not to mention a lot of the cels/sketches have a white or light background).

I would steer clear of making the background too busy. What you have now is a good gallery effect. You made the right call.