Possible reorganisation of the Arts category

Fysh

Hello all,

I've been thinking about the way in which some of the Arts category are organised, as a result of trying (and failing) to find a better way of organising the Comics forum. The fundamental issue I have is that there isn't a consistent policy on how to separate "appreciation" threads from "production/creation" topics, for want of a better way of expressing it.

In the comics forum, for example, most of the traffic we get is discussing what comics people read, where they might get them, and so forth. There is a degree of discussion about making comics, which ranges from people looking for artists/writers to people asking for (or linking to) tips on how to use certain tools or techniques. It would be nice to have an option to put Comics Appreciation threads in one place, and Comics Creation threads in another place. Because the comics forum is relatively quiet, though, I don't think that having a sub-forum for comics creation would be a particularly good idea. It wouldn't have high visibility and would run the risk of being barely-used. Discussions with the mods of Digital Art & Design suggest that this is what happened with the Animation forum which is currently a sub-forum of DA&D.

This got me thinking, and having looked around the Arts category a bit further it dawned on me that under the general heading of Visual Arts there are a number of disparate fora which might benefit from being reorganised.

This is a crude diagram of the current structure of the Arts forum as relating to visual arts:

Arts >
.......Anime & Manga
.......Art & Architecture
.......Audio-Video Editing
.......Comics
.......Digital Art & Design > Animation
.......Films > Film Production
.......Photography > Digital Darkroom | Photo Challenge

(Note that the fora in italics are those which may not need to be included in any reorganisation).

My suggestion would be to have a new sub-category of arts called something like Visual Arts Production, which would mostly reorganise & group existing fora but also create new fora if they are deemed relevant and worthwhile. Soemthing like the below:

Arts >
.......Visual Arts Production>
...............................Animation
...............................AudioVideo Editing
...............................Digital Art & Graphic Design
...............................Film Production
...............................Fine Arts
...............................Illustration & Sequential Art
...............................Photography > Digital Darkroom | Photo Challenge


Note that the main "appreciation" fora for these subjects (Anime & Manga, Comics, Films & its other subfora) could still remain standalone entries under the Art category.

I think this would be a good idea as it would allow all affected fora to separate the "appreciation" threads from the "creative" threads. More importantly, though, it provides specific locations for certain types of creative threads which might previously have been lost for a home between several fora (for example, someone discussing creating comics using Adobe Illustrator might reasonably think that any of Comics, Anime & Manga or Digital Art & Design were legitimate places to post, but which one should they use?)

The important thing to bear in mind here, however, is that of the affected fora I only post regularly in Comics. While I think the Comics forum and its regulars would benefit from this, I don't know whether the mods or users of the other fora I've mentioned above would be in favour of these changes or see any need for them.

What do ye reckon?

Sherifu

Seems like a good idea to me, if there are enough production type threads at the moment to make it worthwhile.

Ron DMC

Not that I use many of those forums all that regularly (occasionally browse Photography) I think it might be worth doing.

The nav bar in general could do with some tidying up (so much so that I tend to just stick to my subbed forums). Your proposal seems quite well thought out and certain warrants some consideration/discussion.

monkeyfudge

Looks good to me. I know Film Production has been moved about in the past... I'm still not sure if having it as a sub forum of Film is quite right.

Of course I'd be interested to see how Photography forum would feel about becoming a part of a sub category though.

But I definitely see where you are coming from with wanting to separate production and appreciation, it's something I'd like to do with Radio at some stage and have a radio production forum. The main radio forum very much just appreciation (or lack there of)

Fajitas!

I'm don't really mind, but I'd like to hear from a few members and the other 2 mods before anything is settled.

Overheal

monkeyfudge

I've stuck up announcements in the Film Production and AV Editing forums.

Hopefully we'll get some feedback on the idea from the regular users.

ztoical

seeing as I've looked for an animation forum before I am all for that but as a regular user of the comics forum and semi-regular in the manga/anime forum I think there is a def a place for an Illustration & Sequential Art forum/sub forum to discuss the creative side of these art forums.

Via the comics forum we have had a number of creative events like the comic creators challenge, a number of comic jams, and 24 hour comics day but there feels a real divide between those using the comics forum as a number of people visiting the forum only do so to talk about collecting/reading comics while others have an interest in the actually art forum and developing their own art. At present all the creative threads tend to be merged into one and its easy for posts to get overlooked. Also a large number of links have been posted to online guides to help people but again the posts are easily over looked.

elven

Doesn't seem like anything that will affect photography too much really. Should we bring it up in the forum, see what the users think? Or is that opening a can of worms?

(I'd have a seperate forum for "please recommend me a compact camera/first DSLR/kit lens replacement/zoom lens/camera bag/tripod/etc" too but that's just when I'm feeling moany... :rolleyes:)

Dades

elven wrote: »

Doesn't seem like anything that will affect photography too much really. Should we bring it up in the forum, see what the users think? Or is that opening a can of worms?

Never ask users! Wait a minute... I'M a user...

Are you sure you want Photography moving to a sub-category (i.e. off the main menu) of Visual Arts Production? Seems like a few popular forums would get subbed in there. If that's not what fysh was suggesting then ignore me.

I don't see too much wrong with the current "Arts" setup tbh.

Citizen_Erased

I think that if you are going to go for such a large re arrangement of forums that there is a much greater possibility for streamlining than you have taken advantage of. If a mass rearrangement is decided upon I would even go so far as to suggest this Layout:

>Arts
...>Visual Arts Production
.......>Photography > its subforums (although photography may not be most suited in this subcategory)
.......>Digital Art & Graphic Design
.......>Film,AudioVideo & Animation
.......>Illustrated,sequential and Fine Arts

I think that this layout would ensure the most acceptable levels of traffic for each new sub forum. I also think that the header "visual arts production" would not be available for posting in , but instead acts only as a signpost to the subforums to prevent posts / queries getting lost and confused.

I will post this up in DA&D and send some of the users opinions this way.

monkeyfudge

Citizen_Erased wrote: »

.......>Film,AudioVideo & Animation
.

Are you suggesting merging 3 diverse forums here?

ztoical

Citizen_Erased wrote: »

.......>Illustrated,sequential and Fine Arts

the whole reason I would want an illustration & sequential art forum is because they are very different to fine arts - otherwise we could just move all the threads regarding comic creation from the comics board to the Art & Architecture or the arts & craft forum. In other art focused messaged boards I post on illustration and fine arts are always different forums.

Fysh

Citizen_Erased wrote: »

>Arts
...>Visual Arts Production
.......>Photography > its subforums (although photography may not be most suited in this subcategory)
.......>Digital Art & Graphic Design
.......>Film,AudioVideo & Animation
.......>Illustrated,sequential and Fine Arts

I think that this layout would ensure the most acceptable levels of traffic for each new sub forum. I also think that the header "visual arts production" would not be available for posting in , but instead acts only as a signpost to the subforums to prevent posts / queries getting lost and confused.

I agree - the header "Visual Arts Production" should really just be a container in the same way that the Films category is.

Regarding further merging or subgrouping (eg Film, AudioVideo & Animation) - while I appreciate the common ground, I'm wary of suggesting such merges unless the moderators and/or userbase concerned suggests them first.

There is a wider issue of how the categories are structured, and I agree that my solution above could be refined further. I'm wary of coming up with something too elaborate without first establishing that there's support for a reorganisation.

Related to this, it does occur to me that it might be useful to have a map of boards sorted by subject rather than the menu structure. Is it possible to have content description tags associated with a given fora, such that you might be able to bring up a list of all fora with that tag? (Perhaps something more easily done with the Biki, but worth considering)

Fajitas!

Maybe just "Visual Arts"?

monkeyfudge

Fajitas! wrote: »

Maybe just "Visual Arts"?

Would people think to look there for audio editing though?

Citizen_Erased

monkeyfudge wrote: »

Are you suggesting merging 3 diverse forums here?

Yes. From my experiences with the animations forum (a sub of DA&D) it does not have enough traffic to warrant its own forum. When I say "film" I am only refaring to the "film production" subsection . The audio/video forum then would to me seem strange not be involved in the above merge so therefore it is added in too. This , from my perception, would create an agreeably diverse forum that would have a very manageable yet far from slow post turn-over.

Perhaps because the "audio" of audiovideo doesn't fall into the term visual it could instead have its own forum although I am not familiar enough with the forum to know if this split is possible.

Citizen_Erased

ztoical wrote: »

In other art focused messaged boards I post on illustration and fine arts are always different forums.

While I accept there may be issues with merging the two , can I ask that the other forums you have refared to , are they more specialised towards just the single subject of art work ?
The real key to doing this right is not ensuring that each subject is given its own individual representation but that instead that the best possible compromise can be reached based on the demand from Boards.ie users and the predicted traffic levels. There is little point to a rearrangement if we are still going to end up with one-post-a-week ghost town sub categories or going too far into the opposite scenario.

ztoical

Citizen_Erased wrote: »

can I ask that the other forums you have refared to , are they more specialised towards just the single subject of art work ?

In the case of a forum such as say Creative Ireland or the artlinks forum they are forums for all areas of art but they are aimed at people working professional in the field so they are not for everyone to post on. We've had a couple of posts in the comic forum for people looking to get together with others to draw comics purely for enjoyment and not as a business venture. While colleges might group animation and film in the same department I've never seen illustration and cartooning put together with fine arts.

I understand the concern that creating a sub forum will result in somewhere with a very little traffic but there have been some people who've gained something so far from some of these forums - last year didn't a bunch of the film production board people take part in the 24 hour film project and we've had a few creative projects emerge from the comics forum.

Fysh

I'd like to get the input of one or more of the Art & Architecture mods before getting too involved in the discussion of whether to include Fine Arts as a category of its own or whether to include it with Illustration & Sequential Arts.

The comic forum has shown that while there isn't a huge amount of traffic for this subject, there is likely enough to justify a dedicated subfora (albeit one that might need a little bit of nursing initially).

A quick glance at Art & Architecture's first page shows that most of the posts seem to be architecture related. If there's not much input from users regarding fine art production then for the time being Fine Art could be dropped completely from the schema, because as Citizen_Erased has pointed out there's no point creating a forum that has no demand.

Citizen_Erased

Yes of course , every forum on Boards.ie has had its little success and victories and I would not want to in anyway hinder those chances. The question is would those things not have occurred simply because the forum in question covered a broader spectrum?

Unfortunately Boards.ie does not have he dedicated traffic for the arts as the other forums you have mentioned so there will be a need for a compromise to keep the post turn over lively. The merges that I have suggest have had no thought put into them and were literally decided in the length of time it took me to type them so of course I am in no way closed minded to different layouts and combinations . But I would be in favour of max 4 subcategories (which does give you another option to play with if we, as proposed earlier, disregard photography from this rearrangement)

snorlax

Maybe a visual arts main tab/ cateogory containing all the relevant fora e.g. arts/crafts, art appreciation, comics/ film,and maybe have showbiz/ literature in a seperate section? Isn't illustration at present covered to a certain extent is covered bt anime/ magna and the arts/ crafts forums?

It would probably be a good idea though to keep the creative fora seperate from the appreciative ones. At present the art/ architecture forum is quite similiar in name to the arts/ crafts forum, maybe it could be re-named to art appreciation and architecture to clairfy the difference between it's purpose, or maybe just a whole new catch all forum for creative arts, illustration and crafts could be created? I believe there is now also an interior design forum on boards.

Calina

I've read the original post a couple of times now. I don't see why difficulties in arranging the Comics forum should lead to this; I use a couple of fora under arts quite a bit and I don't find that the Arts menu is particularly cluttered. Adding an extra layer of - for want of a better word - bureaucracy such as "Visual Arts Production" would be doesn't - from what I can see, bring anything at all.

No one has highlighted what it might bring except to tidy away all the loosely production stuff but to do it, you have to do a little shoe horning and that's not great too. I would never have gone looking for Photography under Visual Arts Production anywhere, ever, for example.

I'm of the opinion that since Arts is not all that heavily cluttered there's no real need to go moving stuff around. For comparison see Games or Sports or Soc. Arts is actually fine, in my opinion. No need to do any reorganisation.

ztoical

snorlax wrote: »

Isn't illustration at present covered to a certain extent is covered bt anime/ magna and the arts/ crafts forums?

the majority of the post in the anime and manga forum are regarding the reading of manga and the watching of anime - with a few threads with requests for rec's of new manga and anime. There are a couple of threads looking for artists or asking about the process of creating manga art but they don't usually get alot of replies in the forum. The comics forum has had some artists/writer posts as well but they are all merged into one post to keep the forum in some sort of order. A sequential art sub forum for comics and manga & anime might work as sequential art covers all areas of comic book art - mainstream, underground, alternative, and manga.

Fysh

Calina wrote: »

I've read the original post a couple of times now. I don't see why difficulties in arranging the Comics forum should lead to this; I use a couple of fora under arts quite a bit and I don't find that the Arts menu is particularly cluttered. Adding an extra layer of - for want of a better word - bureaucracy such as "Visual Arts Production" would be doesn't - from what I can see, bring anything at all.

No one has highlighted what it might bring except to tidy away all the loosely production stuff but to do it, you have to do a little shoe horning and that's not great too. I would never have gone looking for Photography under Visual Arts Production anywhere, ever, for example.

I'm of the opinion that since Arts is not all that heavily cluttered there's no real need to go moving stuff around. For comparison see Games or Sports or Soc. Arts is actually fine, in my opinion. No need to do any reorganisation.

It's pretty simple really, I was trying to sort out a problem that I perceived in the Comics forum and thought that it might be better to try and come up with an idea that could help bring a bit of organisation to several fora rather than just my patch, so to speak.

Regarding the menus you mentioned - Games has 30-odd entries, and Sports has so many that even on a 15" monitor screen I still get a scroll bar on it (40+ by the look of things). So compared to them Arts is doing well, but that's a pretty poor argument because Arts doesn't have as many fora so of course it's comparatively less cluttered.

Put it this way. You say you wouldn't have thought to look under Arts > Visual Arts for "Photography", but chances are you only found it under "Arts" because it was a first-level entry. I'm struggling to believe that any fora would lose a huge amount of traffic by virtue of being in a second-level menu rather than a first-level menu, and I'm also struggling to believe that navigating a second-level menu is such a horrendous struggle that the idea should be shunned at a design level. For a start, there are already 5 such second-level menus within the Arts category and using the grouping I've mentioned would reduce this to 3, as per below:

Anime
Art & Architecture
Arts & Crafts
Body Mod
Celebrity & Showbiz
Comics
Creative Writing
Films >
............Film Awards | Film Reviews | Films
Literature
Mythology
Radio
Sci-fi & Fantasy
Television > (All the television subfora)
Theatre & Performing Arts
Visual Arts Production>
............Animation
............AudioVideo Editing
............Digital Art & Graphic Design
............Film Production
............Fine Arts
............Illustration & Sequential Art
............Photography >>
....................................Digital Darkroom | Photo Challenge

You could even go further and say "why keep it restricted to Visual Arts" and instead have it as "Creative & Production" (although it would need a better name), and that would let you include Creative Writing, Theatre & Performing Arts, Arts & Crafts with room for expansion.

All of which, of course, rests on the assumption that it's worth providing separate places for people to talk about their creative endeavours and their appreciation of [insert entertainment medium here].

(It's worth noting that I've already mentioned in this thread that I think a map of boards.ie fora sorted & grouped by subject matter rather than name or category might be a useful resource. I've had a look at the forum sitemap, but I don't think it's particularly easy to navigate...).

Calina

The point is, you perceived a problem in Comics but that in itself is not an argument for reorganising Arts and to be honest, nothing you have said really amounts to anything further than "Comics needed a reorg".

In other words, you haven't provided any point to doing it in the first place.

ztoical

Calina wrote: »

The point is, you perceived a problem in Comics but that in itself is not an argument for reorganising Arts and to be honest, nothing you have said really amounts to anything further than "Comics needed a reorg".

In other words, you haven't provided any point to doing it in the first place.

I think thats the whole point of this thread - I know Fysh asked a few regular posters to the comics forum via pm about looking for a sub forum for the creative side of comics - the forum gets alot of both "I read comics, my fav book is" threads and "I draw comics heres a link to some of my art can I get feedback" threads - its two very different areas and it made sense to talk about looking for a sub forum.

it was then suggested to contact the mod of the Manga & Anime board as that forum covers some of the same area and they also get some "I draw manga style comics, heres a link to some of my art can I get feedback" threads. It was seen as better to look for one dub forum covering "Sequential Art" that would work for both comics and manga & anime. After PM'ing a few of the mods of the various art forums it seemed better to start a thread in feedback to get peoples opinions rather then [a]just starting threads in each of the forums or be just starting a thread in the new forums forum. There has been discussion before about getting rid of the animation sub forum of digital art and design as its pretty much overlooked at the moment, and some people are confused as to the difference between the Art & Architecture and Arts & Crafts so it can't hurt to talk about the layout of the art section can it?

snorlax

well i think art and architecture was initiallly aimed at the appreciative side of art (hence its old name of art appreciation) but then it expanded to include architecture and the forum i moderated got changed to arts/ crafts from art/ crafts ( i was away at the time so i didn't get a chance to give this change any input) . It would prove useful to make the purpose of both fora more implicit for users and moderators alike.

snickerpuss

Hello, I've been away all week so I'm just seeing this now.

Em Art and Architecture has gotten a bit more architectural in the last while, but it is largely more appreciative than practical. We don't discuss making art and show what we're drawing/painting. That would be Arts/Crafts.
To be honest I think it would be easier to keep it as an Art Appreciation board and have the crafts bit separately but welcome to ideas.

Sorry if this post is confused, my brain still isn't back working!

snorlax

so it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to include appreciation in the forum title as it's more implicit to the forum's function?

bombidol

Sub Seq art to comics and create an illustration forum under arts.