New Community Banners!
Hello there, curious one. Ready for a thrilling tale of data collection and community events? No? Well too bad cuz I'm gonna ramble!
We really love hearing from our community. It means a lot! What you'll find here is the short history of our banner art contests and what led to their sunset, ultimately giving birth to a far superior community banners format.
We celebrated our first year anniversary as a collective with a lot of big events. One of which was the introduction of seasonal banner art contests, starting with Fall of 2021. We were blessed with 6 wonderful pieces of artwork in a very short time span. Judging them wasn't too difficult. Winter 2021 saw 4 wonderful pieces, meaning we had to pick which one didn't make the top 3. Judging them was difficult! Spring 2022 saw 2 wonderful pieces, meaning we had to pick who lost. Judging them was DIFFICULT! You can see the trend here. (You can also see all submitted banners on our fan art page!)
You'd think that with fewer banners we would have an easier time judging them. HAHA no...no that made it so much harder for us. The decline in submissions had us concerned as well. We debated for a few hours and came to the conclusion that we really honestly wanted to show more banners. Then we debated even longer still! How should we go about that? Should it still be a contest? Should there be more than one winner? How should this be structured and what are the pros and cons of all these ideas? What motivates our community to participate? What demotivates them? Thus the feedback survey was born! (Twice, but we don't talk about that.) We asked for your feedback and it was heard loud and clear!
After a month of collecting your feedback, we took to analyzing it. What follows is a breakdown of key take-aways.
A majority (2/3) preferred a gallery format, to do away with the contests. A majority (2/3) preferred a top-3 winners contest if the gallery format was not picked. A significant majority (4/5) wanted the banner to be evenly split, not weighted by placement. A significant majority (4/5) wanted to see us include all of past years’ banners as well if we went with a gallery format. It was clear as day that the current contest format was the opposite of what our community wanted to see. Especially after a staggering majority (9/10) said the 2nd place prize was not worth it. Honestly, that was good news. Expect a proper invite background image soon. Discord's UX made including your banner in the invite background nigh impossible with each update.
It is worth noting that, despite 70% of y'all voting to have an animated carousel of banners, we goofed. We didn't know at the time that banner animations are limited to 5 seconds in length and did not loop unless focused upon. So, that idea is dead. Sorry lol…
A majority (2/3) ranked this event a 7/10 or higher. Which means a lot to us given the above data. We hope the new community banners format is to your liking! At least half of you said these changes ought to help. Thanks!
Overall, motivation and de-motivation were a mixed bag with a lot of targeted feedback. One thing was clear though, many people (1/2) agreed that being a part of the community event is what mattered to them most. That really warmed our hearts. <3
We want to share a few quotes from the feedback that summed up our thoughts and key take-aways better than we ever could.
"Most folks want a community-celebrating banner not a 'best artists' banner."
"My experience in the community has shown the celebration of all skill levels, which the event in the current form does not accurately reflect."
"I want to celebrate the community not who did best, so I like the fanart gallery idea!"
"Something to make it abundant how big this community is, not how capable a few artists are."
Wow. Just, thank you. Y'all really are the MVPs here. Your feedback could not have been better and it really helped us come to an agreement and figure out how to improve our seasonal banner event, to make it the best it can be. We couldn't agree more!
So what's changed? A lot actually! You can read up on the new community banners event here or continue reading for a quick review of what's new.
The contests are over! We now show all banners in a carousel format, changing the banner out every few weeks.
You can submit your banner at any time, and it will be shown. Banners submitted for a season that's already passed this year will be pushed to next year.
Instead of a vague seasonal theme, expect fun seasonal prompts from now on! This summer’s prompt is just Summer though: we didn’t want to pull the rug out from under folks who started work on their banner early.
You can no longer submit multiple times per season, but in turn you can collaborate with others again! Collaboration won't limit you from submitting your own as well.
You can do animation now! A whole 5 seconds of it!
Banners from previous years will be shown at the end of the carousel. New banners take priority and will be shown longer.
No more judging! But we do reserve the right to not use your banner if it breaks or skirts our rules, is considerably low effort, or if it has poor image quality (I.E. difficult to see, photo flash, blurry, etc).
That's everything we have to say.
Thank you for being such a wonderful community! We really love y'all! 💙