We’ve got a bunch of updates today!
Uploading Art
The Art upload form is now mobile friendly with a new thumbnail cropper and rich text editor.
The thumbnail cropper includes expanded support for animated gifs, so you can slide through individual frames and pick your favorite. Another slider is for zooming and you can slide your finger over the thumbnail preview itself to reposition the art. We’re also generating larger thumbnails for future layout updates.
The rich text editor is like the one in this forum, allowing you to add multiple images, video or sketchfab embeds, links, etc. This is a great place to share progress shots and alts of your primary art piece. You could also use this to create a multi-piece comic strip; simply add a bunch of images via the text editor and they will appear directly under your primary art on the view page.
NOTE: If you experience any bugs whatsoever, let us know! You can reply here or PM me.
Update: First time artists may have gotten stuck on the "I agree to the terms" checkbox; this is fixed now.
The new text editor will be useful but probably not the perfect solution for everyone looking to upload multiple art pieces under a single entry. Your primary art upload will be accessible as full quality and full resolution but follow-up art below it will be scaled and mildly compressed like in the forums. We’re exploring a system where you can upload a bunch of pieces and shuffle them around without a text editor involved, retaining the full quality and resolution of each image. That’s for a future update though; for now we want to see how things go with the existing tools.
Next plan for the Art Portal is defaulting to full art pieces in your feed, with the option to toggle back to thumbnails.
Tags in Blogs
When you make or edit a blog post, you’ll now see the option to include tags. These tags will appear at the bottom of your post and users can click them to explore blog posts or other content using the same tags.
Our tag data on the back-end went through a massive change this week, transferring tag data from individual portals into a global system. This has prepared us for some fun future updates. If you have any requests relating to tags, now's a good time to bring them up! We also will be making it more clear when you are performing a regular search or an advanced search based strictly on tags.
The form to make blog posts is still in the old layout and using the old text editor, neither of which is mobile friendly. Our next step here will migrate blog posting to the new layout with the new text editor, so it works on mobile and is consistent with the editor you see in the forums and art upload form.
If you like these updates, please consider becoming a supporter! Monthly and annual subscribers make a huge difference around here and NG gets a little stronger each year thanks to your ongoing support.
Pixel Day
Pixel Day is next week; Wednesday, January 23rd! If you make Pixel art, animation, games or chiptunes we would love to see you share something that day. If you know people who make this sort of stuff, encourage them to sign up and share something as well! We’d love for this to be the best day of the year for pixel aficionados, especially considering how gloomy the winter months can be. The promo art this year is by @moawling!