Jukebox 2016 wrap-up

[morbane]

The creator names have been revealed on Jukebox 2016 works.

Thank you very much to everyone for taking part! Thank you particularly to hhertzof, Measured_Words, and Nary, for tag wrangling, to lalalalalawhy, Measured_Words, merryghoul, Missy, Sumi, thedevilchicken, and Zdenka, for pinch hitting, and to lanalucy and within_a_dream for offering to beta read.

There was a short anon period this year; works have really only been available for a brief time. Although the year's challenge is over, I know I haven't seen everything that interests me yet, and I hope others will continue to view and/or comment along with me.


As usual, I really enjoyed running this, and I am always pleased when new people join in, or previous participants return.

The times of day, and days of the week, on which deadlines or other important things happened, generally worked well for me. Did anyone have any thoughts on that? If I don't hear any suggestions, I'll probably make next year's schedule very similar, other commitments permitting. Was the creation period long enough for you?

I'm still struggling with guidelines for art, and we had fewer artists this year to weigh in, I know. There are problems with using pixel size as a guideline - it's so arbitrary, and the dimensions I picked could even be irritatingly large on some screens. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I could also use some help with the design and layout of the comm. Web design is really not my strong suit, and I know that neither the LJ nor the DW side are the prettiest and best organised they could be.

Only one person asked me to beta this year! That's fewer than usual... I know some people don't use betas, and other people ask their friends or partners to be their regular betas. I encourage getting feedback on your work before submitting it as a gift, but I hesitate to make it mandatory. Anyway: is there anything I can do to make it easier to find, or be, a beta?

If you have any comments on these thoughts, or other aspects of the exchange, please feel welcome to add them.

Oh, and one last, fun question: are there any songs from this year's tag set that you particularly hope people nominate next year? Or, any new nominations you're thinking of for next year?

Remember this post is also on LJ.


ETA: I will probably have 6 or 7 nominations per person next year instead of 8 - I think people enjoyed 8, but it's more work for me and matching was not as close as in previous years. I will also probably start the exchange sliiiightly earlier, offline commitments permitting, as Easter is much later in 2017 so I won't be planning around it.

Comments

[extrapenguin]

The exchange timeline and deadlines worked for me, though I am a fast writer. The only way to really improve the experience for me would be to have it be less on top of Space Swap, though that's more at my end of things. :P

Re: art, a lot of exchanges mandate "clean sketches on nonlined paper" or "finished graphic". Perhaps see if something like that would be more to your liking on art rules?

On layout design, the greatest problems imo are that the grey is too light and the background is too contrasty. Fix those, and you're fine to go. (Maybe make the red less eye-searing while you're at it, too.)

I got my betas by asking friends and Yulechat, and I imagine a lot of other people did so, too. I'd think that a lot of people are slightly hesitant to have a stranger beta their fic, and thus go knocking on the doors of any usual betas they have.

In preparation of next year, I've started making a text file with basically my entire music library, sorted by keyword. Currently, I'm thinking about Stratovarius' Stand My Ground, and I'll nom at least one villainess song, which might be either Maija Vilkkumaa's Satumaa-tango or Delain's Mother Machine.

[morbane]

Thanks for the visual feedback! I'm not sure I follow all of it - when you say the grey is too light but the background is too contrasty, isn't that a contradiction? If the grey were darker the contrast would be greater, surely?

I'm also sticking with existing Dreamwidth and LiveJournal templates. Do you have any you could recommend?

I'd think that a lot of people are slightly hesitant to have a stranger beta their fic. Yeah, maybe that's so. But beta posts have been a thing in all the exchanges I've done, and I don't know what makes the model work or not. Is someone in Yulechat so much less a stranger?

I may be biased because I've had very good experiences asking volunteer strangers to beta for me.

Maybe for original art that would work. I don't think 'finished graphic' is clear enough - I need something to cite that isn't just my subjective opinion against another's.

[extrapenguin]

The background image is too contrasty. It's got black and white, and it distracts the eye from the important stuff, ie. the actual content.

The grey that's found on the headers of stuff (background of the "Page Summary" bit etc) is too visually close to the white of the text area backgrounds, and should be darker. The alternative to this is to bring the red closer to the white, but I feel that making the grey darker would be better.

The current template is fine.

[morbane]

Ahhhh, the background images! Okay, thanks, I can definitely play with that.

It's a little more difficult to play with the grey on the background of the template, because that comes from the template.

[extrapenguin]

Go to https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/ then select jukebox-fest instead of morbane from the dropdown at the top, then click "Customize your theme" from the box on the right. Click "Colors" in the link bar on the left, and play with the hex codes. I think "Entry title background color" might be what you're looking for, though you may have to hunt around a bit.