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corvidry · 5 years ago

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All About RP Icons For Beginners by Birdy

Hi OP, I’m not sure how experienced you are with all the nonsense surrounding the making and using of RP icons, so I’m gonna come at it as though you don’t have any experience with it at all and I’m sorry if that’s too simplified for you, but also if I’m gonna write many paragraphs about one topic I may as well make it accessible for as many people as possible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This post goes into what tools are out there for the popular methods of finding/making RP icons in the first half and my personal methodology for choosing and using them in my RP for the second half. This is a very surface level answer to the question and is not meant to be an in depth tutorial for the more labor intensive aspects of the process, but if you guys want more information and can’t find it elsewhere, please ask and I'll know what I should be talking about next.

Also I’m also contractually obligated to mention to the masses that I do take commissions both for the drawing of RP icons and the service of capping, cutting, recoloring, and framing canon icons. Sometimes I even post batches of canon character icons for free on this blog so like,,,,, hit me up if you want. But!! You don’t need me, you can absolutely do all of it yourself!! I go into the broad strokes below.

Question 1: “How do you get icons?”

This is kind of a broad question and the answer depends on what your needs are. The right answer for you is gonna live in one of two camps

Find some that already exist that are free to use

Make them yourself / commission somebody else to make them for you.

What you'll choose is gonna depend a lot on your character first and foremost. The big determining factor in most cases is whether or not the face you want has been in anything you can take pictures of.

If you have a canon character who exists in visible media--

--you're in luck! The chances of you finding some resources that exist already is higher when you have a canon character who is in at least a few pieces of media. OP asked about Pearl from Steven Universe, and she's a great example of a character with a lot of resources. Searching for rp icons of a popular character will often yield packs of icons on Tumblr, Dreamwidth, Livejournal, etc. Most of these will be completely free to use or have very reasonable conditions for use (like credit the person who made them for example.) It's often a good first step to see what preexisting resources are available to you even if you still plan on making your own icons.

If you have an OC or a character that's not all that popular--

--you're gonna fall into the second camp. If you want icons, you have to have them made. So what are your options?

Help! My character appears in no media! What are my options?

If your character appears in no media you're in a tough spot. Different people approach this problem in different ways.

Face Claims

One option you have is to choose a face claim to represent your character. In roleplay a face claim or ‘FC’ is a person or character whose appearance you use for the physical description of your character. I personally am not big on doing this, I prefer drawn icons and I tend to RP as animated characters, but some people really like using celebrities and stuff to represent their characters. When I was playing Angus McDonald he hadn't appeared in any visual media yet, so I sometimes used Bryce Clyde Jenkins as the face claim for certain types of threads.

If you're somebody who likes to use face claims there are loads of resources out there for finding the perfect one, including here on tumblr. Try searching up RP Faceclaim Directory and playing around with some of the ones that pop up.

DIY RP Icons

The other option you have is to create those icons from scratch. Draw them yourself based on icons you like or commission an artist to draw some for you. If you can't draw yourself, I've seen some people get really creative with this. Some people create their character in the sims, dollmakers, or their favorite RPG and then take screenshots of that to use for icons. There's also no law that says every icon you use has to be your character's face. When I was writing a trashy mermaid AU I got a lot of mileage out of icons that depicted harbor and oceanic scenes with no actual faces. Get creative, go nuts, have fun.

Icons Aren’t That Important

The other thing to remember that icons are not a must in many RP circles. It's perfectly possible to have a great time and write cool stuff without any pictures at all. Depending on your platform of choice there are probably also other interesting ways you can make your posts unique to you by formatting the text or using symbols or emojis or otherwise denoting your personal style in text.

Help! My character appears in lots of media! How do I make icons?

Again, there are a million and one answers to this question and it really depends on what tools are available to you and what your preferences are. This section is not a tutorial but it will outline some of the options you can look into.

The icon making process is typically in 2 stages-- stage 1: get all your images of your character, and stage 2: edit all of those images into icons.

If you have access to the source material, any version of Photoshop, and software that automates the collection screencaps from video (KM Player, VLC, etc) you're pretty much gucci. You're gonna have no problem getting loads of nice icons in a reasonably short amount of time and there are a million different tutorials on how to use those things whichever way you prefer.

If you don't have access to those things you still have options.

You can still screencap things manually, and you can screencap in batches by holding down the windows key and pressing PrtSc any time you want to save an image. They should be saving to >pictures>screenshots unless you’ve set things up differently. It’s a good way to take a lot of screenshots without stopping in between.

( EDIT / UPDATE: to say that if you use automation for taking screencaps remember to turn that shit off when you’re not using because it oh mylanta it WILL continue to take images without you realizing. Figured out where all my disk space has been going with this rookie mistake, thanks OP)

Additionally, PhotoScape X is a really great little tool for windows and mac that I've never seen anybody talk about, but I use it sometimes and it's totally free with the exception of a few paid features I’ve never once needed or wanted. This program is not as efficient as using Photoshop but it has presets for cropping images easily as well as batch editing options for some basic borders and color retouching. While it’s not as powerful as Photoshop, you can get a lot done with it reasonably quickly compared to other choices. You can also take and edit snips of anything on your screen with it, which is really really useful if you don’t have access to the video or image files you would need on your hard drive for other version of this process. The program looks like this:

Also, not to be like a minimalist about it, but you can also just fucken use Microsoft Paint or whatever you have. Like, whatever, there’s no law. You graphics dont have to be comlpex or deep fried. Half of my icons have been made or edited in paint at some point. It wont be as fast as some of these other methods but a lot of us aren't out here making icons in batches of 100 at a time.

Anything that you can use to make smallish images of your characters face will work to make icons.

If you want more information about any of these methods of icon creation let me know and I’ll talk about them.

Question 2: “How do you make your icons ‘work’ in posts?”

I'm a little confused on what you mean by "make them work" so I'm gonna cover my bases here. I'm assuming what you're getting at is a sort of sense of cohesion in the icons I use, or having the "right" expression for the scene I'm writing. Either that or them not stretching and looking weird thanks to tumblr. I’ll get to both of those.

And before I go into my own rationale for icon choices I feel I should point out that a lot of people who aren't me do successfully manufacture cohesion out of their images by doing fun stylistic things like recoloring their images all the same way or putting cute borders and stuff around them or making them fun shapes, and that's totally something you can learn how to do if it interests you. I do this for icons commissioned by other people and I’m not against talking about how to do those things, but I don’t really bother with them for my own icons all that much. That stuff is all fun and it’s a neat thing you could get into that can make your icons all look really nice together.

BUT ANYWAY --

Since the character you asked about is Pearl, I’m going to focus on her. Nearly all of my Pearl icons are completely unedited and a lot of the credit I would have to give regarding icon quality goes to Pearl herself and the consistently good lighting that the show uses. I don’t have a huge need for editing or color retouching beyond making memes or whatever other goofy things I might be getting up to. Pearl is extremely expressive compared to other characters I have written and since she's in nearly every episode, I've managed to collect…

...oh god, that’s too many icons.

Pearl is a main character and I've been RPing as her for over 6 years now so I have a fuckload of images to choose from and I'm not gonna pretend that doesn't help when I wanna “make things work”. She gives me a lot of options.

That said, you absolutely don't need 3000 images to make a good post. The way I've collected and organized these images may be of use to you even if you dont have as many icons. I've done a lot with my setup to make finding the right icon very easy.

For starters, a minor subset of my Pearl icons are grouped by a particular defining feature. I have one large Pearly folder full of icons and then a few smaller folders inside for icons I thought worth grouping separately. For example, all icons of SUF Pearl in her new jacket are in the same folder. All icons of Pearl in short term alternate outfits are in the same folder. Anything I sourced from Attack the Light is in its own folder. I do this with anything that has a very specific use, such as writing AU content or flashbacks to specific time periods. If I can picture an icon in my head, I usually know where in my ridiculous hell collection to go to find it.

This folder was originally just for her pre-canon outfit but now all of her outfits that only appeared temporarily are in there.

Perhaps more important for the sake of cohesion is that nearly all of my icons that aren’t squirreled away in some smaller folder are loosely arranged by episode. What that means is that most of the time I have icons from the same scene right next to one another. It makes it incredibly easy to make my RP replies appear as though it's all one cohesive scene even if I use more than one icon. When you do it this way it becomes very easy to choose icons that have the same lighting or that appear to lead from one expression seamlessly into another. Exhibit A:

While the vast majority of my icons are numbered, I do take the time to name ones I find myself using a lot or that have particularly unique expressions. Usually I'll choose names that I'll find descriptive or easy to remember based on the context of the icon. You can have a lot of fun with that and never lose your favorites.

Also don't be afraid to lean on icons you got from weird places if you like them. The icons of Pearl from the official comics run don’t look like most of what I have. I think them being different would turn a lot of RPers off, but I use them a lot because I like the style and I almost never see other Pearl RPers using them. It either makes me stand out or it makes me tacky, one of the two, haven’t figured out which, but also I’m not stopping.

And just to reiterate, you can use icons that aren’t your character if they’re thematically relevant or vague enough to look like them. When I’m capping I’ve started saving a folder of miscellaneous environments of interests, hands, and other everyday types of scenery that appear in the thing I’m taking screencaps of.

You can use any size you want for RP icons but the most common is 100x100 or 150x150 pixels. Any smaller than that and the image gets to be difficult to read and work with in my opinion. That doesn’t stop people, of course, but I’m elderly and need glasses now, so no tiny icons for me. On that note, I rarely see RP icons larger than 300x300. Any larger than that it tends to get bulky and be in the way of other people’s comfortable internet browsing experience, especially on mobile. Of course, these are just my suggestions. What you choose will ultimately be up to you, but somewhere in that 100 to 300 px range is pretty safe.

A very tumblr specific thing to know is that any image that is wider than 300 pixels will be stretched to hell, so you probably want to keep it smaller than that.

Thanks, Tumblr, I hate it!

Also, don’t be afraid to make trash images for fun if you’re so inclined. People love that, or at least I do. Not having the right icon can be fun and lead to a very silly solution. Lean into being a shitposter if that’s what you’re called to do.

So yeah, that’s basically what my suggestions are. Collect your images in a way that helps cohesion and ease of use. Keep them a good size. Don’t be afraid to get unconventional with your choices or make memes or whatever. It’s all for a fun time.

Anyway, that’s all I can think of right now, but more info on any of this can be obtained at the price of one ask, I know it was a lot of different moving parts.

#rp #rp icons #birdy answers #my graphics #my icons #long post

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we-johnnygonzalez-blog · 6 years ago

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People Ask Their Most Pressing SEO Questions — Our Experts Answer

Posted by TheMozTeam

We teamed up with our friends at Duda, a website design scaling platform service, who asked their agency customers to divulge their most pressing SEO questions, quandaries, and concerns. Our in-house SEO experts, always down for a challenge, hunkered down to collaborate on providing them with answers. From Schema.org to voice search to local targeting, we're tackling real-world questions about organic search. Read on for digestible insights and further resources!

How do you optimize for international markets?

International sites can be multi-regional, multilingual, or both. The website setup will differ depending on that classification.

Multi-regional sites are those that target audiences from multiple countries. For example: a site that targets users in the U.S. and the U.K.

Multilingual sites are those that target speakers of multiple languages. For example, a site that targets both English and Spanish-speakers.

To geo-target sections of your site to different countries, you can use a country-specific domain (ccTLD) such as “.de” for Germany or subdomains/subdirectories on generic TLDs such as “example.com/de.”

For different language versions of your content, Google recommends using different URLs rather than using cookies to change the language of the content on the page. If you do this, make use of the hreflang tag to tell Google about alternate language versions of the page.

For more information on internationalization, visit Google’s “Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites” or Moz’s guide to international SEO.

How do we communicate to clients that SEO projects need ongoing maintenance work?

If your client is having difficulty understanding SEO as a continuous effort, rather than a one-and-done task, it can be helpful to highlight the changing nature of the web.

Say you created enough quality content and earned enough links to that content to earn yourself a spot at the top of page one. Because organic placement is earned and not paid for, you don’t have to keep paying to maintain that placement on page one. However, what happens when a competitor comes along with better content that has more links than your content? Because Google wants to surface the highest quality content, your page’s rankings will likely suffer in favor of this better page.

Maybe it’s not a competitor that depreciates your site’s rankings. Maybe new technology comes along and now your page is outdated or even broken in some areas.

Or how about pages that are ranking highly in search results, only to get crowded out by a featured snippet, a Knowledge Panel, Google Ads, or whatever the latest SERP feature is?

Set-it-and-forget-it is not an option. Your competitors are always on your heels, technology is always changing, and Google is constantly changing the search experience.

SEO specialists are here to ensure you stay at the forefront of all these changes because the cost of inaction is often the loss of previously earned organic visibility.

How do I see what subpages Google delivers on a search? (Such as when the main page shows an assortment of subpages below the result, via an indent.)

Sometimes, as part of a URL’s result snippet, Google will list additional subpages from that domain beneath the main title-url-description. These are called organic sitelinks. Site owners have no control over when and which URLs Google chooses to show here aside from deleting or NoIndexing the page from the site.

If you’re tracking keywords in a Moz Pro Campaign, you have the ability to see which SERP features (including sitelinks) your pages appear in.

The Moz Keyword Explorer research tool also allows you to view SERP features by keyword:

What are the best techniques for analyzing competitors?

One of the best ways to begin a competitor analysis is by identifying the URLs on your competitor’s site that you’re directly competing with. The idea of analyzing an entire website against your own can be overwhelming, so start with the areas of direct competition.

For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “best apple pie recipes,” identify the top ranking URL(s) for that particular query and evaluate them against your apple pie recipe page.

You should consider comparing qualities such as:

Total number of inbound links & referring domains (Moz Link Explorer >> Compare Link Profiles)

Find links that your competitors have, but you don’t

Content characteristics like length, formatting, and media (ex: video, images, etc.)

Other keywords your competitor’s page is ranking for (Moz Keyword Explorer)

Rich snippets & structured data usage (Google Structured Data Testing Tool)

Page speed (Google PageSpeed Insights)

Moz also created the metrics Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) to help website owners better understand their ranking ability compared to their competitors. For example, if your URL has a PA of 35 and your competitor’s URL has a PA of 40, it’s likely that their URL will rank more favorably in search results.

Competitor analysis is a great benchmarking tool and can give you great ideas for your own strategies, but remember, if your only strategy is emulation, the best you’ll ever be is the second-best version of your competitors!

As an SEO agency, can you put a backlink to your website on clients’ pages without getting a Google penalty? (Think the Google Penguin update.)

Many website design and digital marketing agencies add a link to their website in the footer of all their clients’ websites (usually via their logo or brand name). Google says in their quality guidelines that “creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines” and they use the example of “widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites.” This does not mean that all such footer links are a violation of Google’s guidelines. What it does mean is that these links have to be vouched for by the site’s owner. For example, an agency cannot require this type of link on their clients’ websites as part of their terms of service or contract. You must allow your client the choice of using nofollow or removing the link.

The fourth update of the Google Penguin algorithm was rolled into Google’s core algorithm in September of 2016. This new “gentler” algorithm, described in the Google Algorithm Change History, devalues unnatural links, rather than penalizing sites, but link schemes that violate Google’s quality guidelines should still be avoided.

We’re working on a new website. How do we communicate the value of SEO to our customers?

When someone searches a word or phrase related to a business, good SEO ensures that the business’s website shows up prominently in the organic (non-ad) search results, that their result is informative and enticing enough to prompt searchers to click, and that the visitor has a positive experience with the website. In other words, good SEO helps a website get found, get chosen, and convert new business.

That’s done through activities that fall into three main categories:

Content: Website content should be written to address your audience’s needs at all stages of their purchase journey: from top-of-funnel, informational content to bottom-of-funnel, I-want-to-buy content. Search engine optimized content is really just content that is written around the topics your audience wants and in the formats they want it, with the purpose of converting or assisting conversions.

Links: Earning links to your web content from high-quality, relevant websites not only helps Google find your content, it signals that your site is trustworthy.

Accessibility: Ensuring that your website and its content can be found and understood by both search engines and people. A strong technical foundation also increases the likelihood that visitors to the website have a positive experience on any device.

Why is SEO valuable? Simply put, it’s one more place to get in front of people who need the products or services you offer. With 40–60 billion Google searches in the US every month, and more than 41% / 62% (mobile / desktop) of clicks going to organic, it’s an investment you can’t afford to ignore.

How do you optimize for voice search? Where do you find phrases used via tools like Google Analytics?

Google doesn’t yet separate out voice query data from text query data, but many queries don’t change drastically with the medium (speaking vs. typing the question), so the current keyword data we have can still be a valuable way to target voice searchers. It’s important here to draw the distinction between voice search (“Hey Google, where is the Space Needle?”) and voice commands (ex: “Hey Google, tell me about my day”) — the latter are not queries, but rather spoken tasks that certain voice assistant devices will respond to. These voice commands differ from what we’d type, but they are not the same as a search query.

Voice assistant devices typically pull their answers to informational queries from their Knowledge Graph or from the top of organic search results, which is often a featured snippet. That’s why one of the best ways to go after voice queries is to capture featured snippets.

If you’re a local business, it’s also important to have your GMB data completely and accurately filled out, as this can influence the results Google surfaces for voice assistance like, “Hey Google, find me a pizza place near me that’s open now.”

Should my clients use a service such as Yext? Do they work? Is it worth it?

Automated listings management can be hugely helpful, but there are some genuine pain points with Yext, in particular. These include pricing (very expensive) and the fact that Yext charges customers to push their data to many directories that see little, if any, human use. Most importantly, local business owners need to understand that Yext is basically putting a paid layer of good data over the top of bad data — sweeping dirt under the carpet, you might say. Once you stop paying Yext, they pull up the carpet and there’s all your dirt again. By contrast, services like Moz Local (automated citation management) and Whitespark (manual citation management) correct your bad data at the source, rather than just putting a temporary paid Band-Aid over it. So, investigate all options and choose wisely.

How do I best target specific towns and cities my clients want to be found in outside of their physical location?

If you market a service area business (like a plumber), create a great website landing page with consumer-centric, helpful, unique content for each of your major service cities. Also very interesting for service area businesses is the fact that Google just changed its handling of setting the service radius in your Google My Business dashboard so that it reflects your true service area instead of your physical address. If you market a brick-and-mortar business that customers come to from other areas, it’s typically not useful to create content saying, “People drive to us from X!” Rather, build relationships with neighboring communities in the real world, reflect them on your social outreach, and, if they’re really of interest, reflect them on your website. Both service area businesses and bricks-and-mortar models may need to invest in PPC to increase visibility in all desired locations.

How often should I change page titles and meta descriptions to help local SEO?

While it’s good to experiment, don’t change your major tags just for the sake of busy work. Rather, if some societal trend changes the way people talk about something you offer, consider editing your titles and descriptions. For example, an auto dealership could realize that its consumers have started searching for “EVs” more than electric vehicles because society has become comfortable enough with these products to refer to them in shorthand. If keyword research and trend analysis indicate a shift like this, then it may be time to re-optimize elements of your website. Changing any part of your optimization is only going to help you rank better if it reflects how customers are searching.

Read more about title tags and metas:

What is a title tag? - SEO Learning Center

7 ‹Title Tag› Hacks for Increased Rankings + Traffic - Whiteboard Friday

What is a meta description? - SEO Learning Center

Should you service clients within the same niche, since there can only be one #1?

If your keywords have no local intent, then taking on two clients competing for the same terms nationally could certainly be unethical. But this is a great question, because it presents the opportunity to absorb the fact that for any keyword for which Google perceives a local intent, there is no longer only one #1. For these search terms, both local and many organic results are personalized to the location of the searcher.

Your Mexican restaurant client in downtown isn’t really competing with your Mexican restaurant client uptown when a user searches for “best tacos.” Searchers’ results will change depending on where they are in the city when they search. So unless you’ve got two identical businesses within the same couple of blocks in a city, you can serve them both, working hard to find the USP of each client to help them shine bright in their particular setting for searchers in close proximity.

Is it better to have a one-page format or break it into 3–5 pages for a local service company that does not have lengthy content?

This question is looking for an easy way out of publishing when you’ve become a publisher. Every business with a website is a publisher, and there’s no good excuse for not having adequate content to create a landing page for each of your services, and a landing page for each of the cities you serve. I believe this question (and it’s a common one!) arises from businesses not being sure what to write about to differentiate their services in one location from their services in another. The services are the same, but what’s different is the location!

Publish text and video reviews from customers there, showcase your best projects there, offer tips specific to the geography and regulations there, interview service people, interview experts, sponsor teams and events in those service locations, etc. These things require an investment of time, but you’re in the publishing business now, so invest the time and get publishing! All a one-page website shows is a lack of commitment to customer service. For more on this, read Overcoming Your Fear of Local Landing Pages.

How much content do you need for SEO?

Intent, intent, intent! Google’s ranking signals are going to vary depending on the intent behind the query, and thank goodness for that! This is why you don’t need a 3,000-word article for your product page to rank, for example.

The answer to “how much content does my page need?” is “enough content for it to be complete and comprehensive,” which is a subjective factor that is going to differ from query to query.

Whether you write 300 words or 3,000 words isn’t the issue. It’s whether you completely and thoroughly addressed the page topic.

Check out these Whiteboard Fridays around content for SEO:

Why Good Unique Content Needs to Die - Whiteboard Friday

How to Create 10x Content - Whiteboard Friday

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