[AGA-Contest] 86, and signing out for today...

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

Just another quick note.  Been spending the last 2 or so hours going 
through and correcting peoples' planting plans.  Something we've NEVER 
been able to impress on a large portion of the entrants is to leave the 
names of the plants OUT OF the bloody image, and type it into the caption 
instead -- I've retyped over 20 planting plans into the corresponding 
captions tonight (as well as cropped, selectively color-inverted, and 
otherwise cleaned up the images).

"Why?" I hear you ask?

  1. Everyone uses different fonts and sizes, and we want a nice
     consistent look to the site.
  2. When the image is resized down to 400 or 600 pixels wide, oftentimes
     the text is illegible.
  3. Text is searchable, images are not.  Someday we are going to add this
     site into the AGA's search engine.
  4. Wastes space (same argument for that small percentage of the entrants
     that includes a huge white or black border around their picture,
     which I also crop and edit).
  5. A lot of the names are misspelled!  We can fix text (and in fact I
     will be putting feelers out for a proofer to help with this next
     month).  We can't easily fix misspellings in images.

It's been in the instructions for the last 2 years, but I wonder if 
there's a better way to get it across.  For now I've put a big red warning 
on the home page.

[Eep, here came another one while I've been typing.  Back to photoshop!]

  - Erik

--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
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