The Story Behind the Issue
TFB #39: Wintreath's Most Mentioned, Part 1
In the past, putting together the leading article was as simple as writing out what I thought about something (thus "The Word of the Monarch" and pasting it in. However, recently we've instead done actual articles that highlight different aspects of our community, and in many cases there's been a story behind them. How did the idea come up? How did it come together? What went into the final product?
Behind the Issue aims to tell that story.
This will not be a regular addition to The Frosty Bugle. Sometimes the story really is just me writing what I think about something, and I don't want to commit myself to another weekly writing obligation...but as there's a story and as I feel like, I'll take some time to write them out. Starting with the story behind our current edition:
Wintreath's Most Mentioned.
The Original IdeaWintreath's Most Mentioned was originally inspired by
NationStates Today's
Power 20, where a voting panel ranks the 20 most influential players in NationStates gameplay. One of the main criticisms of the series is that members of the voting panel often end up on the list itself, and I thought we could play on that in our own release. My original idea was to have a voting panel as well, and if the result was the same have a tagline such as "because we can pat each other on the back too!", just as a fun edition. But when I mentioned the idea to the Cabinet, the response was not exactly stellar. Even as a fun, light-hearted edition, people still thought it emulated the Power 20 too much, and not in a good way.
The response convinced me that I wasn't on the right track, so the idea went back to the drawing board for awhile.
Inspiration Strikes!Then last week I wondered how often each person in Wintreath had been mentioned in The Frosty Bugle over time. I planned to have a topic on this forum with a running tally, like some sort of always-running contest, but halfway through counting I realized this might be the fun basis for a ranking that I'd been looking for. Basing a prominence ranking on number of mentions in a publication
does seem zany at first, but it also makes an odd kind of sense. The Frosty Bugle covers just about everything going on in Wintreath, along with aspects that I feel should be highlighted, and the results were completely logical. The first paragraph of the article keeps the snarky style I'd originally imagined, but this is not a joke ranking by any means...it ended up being a genuine ranking that did justice to people who deserve the recognition (I hope it does at least).
I went back to the Cabinet with my list in hand. After letting them guess for the better part of an hour what the list was (which alone made the work of counting up the number of mentions worth it), I revealed it was a ranking based on number of mentions in TFB. Even then there was some doubts, not because it was too much like the other series, but because we have some hardworking people in the Cabinet who feel like they don't deserve the recognition. I have to admit that it felt good to reassure them that they actually do, and I was glad that the ranking ended up being genuine so I could say that.
Putting it All TogetherWriting the article was quick and easy, mostly because they've done and been part of so much that I could mention. In fact, the problem was more figuring out what to exclude to keep people's sections from running on too long. The real problem was with putting together the formatting on the NationStates edition. Usually the leading article is just text with an image or two thrown in, but for this edition I wanted to do something new in a way that would better honour the people on there.
Unfortunately, the options just aren't there to do awesome formatting for the forum edition, which is something I'd like to change in the future. On the other hand, it is possible on the NS edition, but making it happen can be a very frustrating experience. You can't put boxes within boxes in a NS dispatch, you have no way to control the padding of the background-block elements, and you can't control the width of table columns. My original idea was to have the person's name and avatar to the left of the section about them, but the column was so thin that the images were automatically resized to the point of not being recognizable. For a time I didn't it was going to be possible to include avatars at all.
But I sit it aside for a bit, and it came to mind to do something simpler: just put the avatar at the top. I experimented with resizing avatars so that it was large enough to be prominent but not so large that it made the article longer than it should be. The Frosty Bugle is supposed to be a quick, easy read, so I'm always mindful of keeping articles from going on too long (this is also why I split it into 2 parts). Then we ended up talking in the Cabinet Discord channel about the background for Dawsinian's avatar and whether it should be transparent. After a failed attempt from me, TGN made a version that looked really good, and it's the version that ended up in the article. In the process, I stumbled on a way to add padding so the text didn't start right at the edge: put the content in a central table cell with two blank cells on both sides of it. As someone who finds it jarring to read unpadded text, this discovery made me very happy.
All that was left was getting the colors in order. The colors needed to work with both the light and dark NS themes, and I decided to pick two that would alternate. As usual when I need to pick out colors, I used the
Coolors Palette Generator until I found two that worked well together. Then I came up with the idea of having dark text on the yellow background and lighter text on the darker background, which made each section pop a little more.
Overall, it took about 5 hours to write and design the leading article (compared to 1 for the usual text and image editions), but it was worth the time and work. I absolutely love the design and the colors, and now that I have the template I imagine it's going to be used a lot in the future. Going forward I hope to have more "community input" articles (like last week's Faces of Pride article), and I think this would be great for those as well as any future rankings.
The OutcomeOn a personal level, I've been very proud of the articles I've been putting together for the recent editions of The Frosty Bugle, and this one is no exception. I think the design on the NS edition is one of the best I've put together for TFB yet, but more importantly the article highlights members of our community who deserve recognition in a way that I hope does them justice. I'm very glad that we ditched the original joking idea for something that turned out more genuine and in-line with what our community is.
The response seems to be positive too, with 53 reads and 12 upvotes on the NS edition and 24 views on the forums after 2 days. I don't entirely know why...I wish I had more insight into why some editions were more popular than others. However, I've noticed that editions that highlight people in our community in some way tend to do better, and I think the recent move from publishing on Sundays to Fridays has helped too. Either way, I hope that people enjoyed reading this week's edition...at the very least, I can say a lot of work went into it.
