gumroad cover images -- what to do?
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Elliot Temple
Oct 5, 2016, 3:26:15 PM10/5/16
to FI, FIGG
gumroad crops cover images to a wide variety of sizes. they also tile images sometimes which is even worse.
looking around at a variety of other people's cover images, a lot of them are broken on mobile, on search pages, and in various other scenarios.
including images gumroad bragged about in their own blog post on great covers.
gumroad's tech support is, so far, about as horrifically bad as you might expect from stereotypical Indian outsourcing. in the middle of what i wrote i basically asked if i was supposed to center everything and waste most of the space in the cover image, and tech support then chose to not reply to me since they figured i already knew the answer (yes).
my belief is a large portion of well-designed covers shouldn't be cropped/resized/tiled AT ALL, except when you resize proportionally (no stretching, same aspect ratio). just show the image...
gumroad's image editing also frequently results in their price tag covering up the wrong stuff in a really bad way. also the title text that shows up when you hover can end up on top of bad stuff (e.g. white text on top of white text looks SUPER bad).
and it seems like i can't expect to provide decent screenshots of my screencasts for people to preview before buying. cuz they will get fucked up by the automatic image editing.
i looked at some competitors. sellfy has a broken cutoff cover (title cutoff mid letter, plus the whole head is cut off from a photo) on their homepage right now.
selz i couldn't even find any store pages for anyone. then trying to log in with google to view someone's store page (i thought) it signed me up for a free trial. i uploaded a test image and saw it get cropped. they're probably similar. selz's help page says:
https://selz.com/support/what-is-the-best-size-for-my-image/
> There’s no “best size” for an item listing image
they literally don't even try to tell you any pixel dimensions to make covers to actually work.
gumroad tells you dimensions you are supposed to use, they just don't really work.
gumroad is blatantly broken on iphone 6s. if you click the individual product on the store page, under the cover image you get a bunch of extra whitespace. and if you try to scroll down on it, sometimes you scroll the background page instead of front content.
the saddest thing is iPhones work fine with desktop sites. if they'd just delete all their special mobile code it'd work better.
(btw i am currently being penalized by google for my decision to not have special mobile code on my websites. it made them work better than before, but also made google's very inaccurate algorithm think they aren't optimized for mobile)
on the other hand i really really don't want to deal with managing my own store where i have to track who bought what and let them download it. i don't wanna implement all this stuff myself. that seems like a terrible idea.
seems like the options are either outsource this to grossly incompetent people, or do a ton of work myself to reimplement a common thing tons of people want that makes no sense not to mass produce.
it's sad that e.g. "let people sell a pdf online" is the kind of thing the world hasn't really figured out yet.
thoughts?
Elliot Temple
Get my philosophy newsletter:
www.fallibleideas.com/newsletter
looking around at a variety of other people's cover images, a lot of them are broken on mobile, on search pages, and in various other scenarios.
including images gumroad bragged about in their own blog post on great covers.
gumroad's tech support is, so far, about as horrifically bad as you might expect from stereotypical Indian outsourcing. in the middle of what i wrote i basically asked if i was supposed to center everything and waste most of the space in the cover image, and tech support then chose to not reply to me since they figured i already knew the answer (yes).
my belief is a large portion of well-designed covers shouldn't be cropped/resized/tiled AT ALL, except when you resize proportionally (no stretching, same aspect ratio). just show the image...
gumroad's image editing also frequently results in their price tag covering up the wrong stuff in a really bad way. also the title text that shows up when you hover can end up on top of bad stuff (e.g. white text on top of white text looks SUPER bad).
and it seems like i can't expect to provide decent screenshots of my screencasts for people to preview before buying. cuz they will get fucked up by the automatic image editing.
i looked at some competitors. sellfy has a broken cutoff cover (title cutoff mid letter, plus the whole head is cut off from a photo) on their homepage right now.
selz i couldn't even find any store pages for anyone. then trying to log in with google to view someone's store page (i thought) it signed me up for a free trial. i uploaded a test image and saw it get cropped. they're probably similar. selz's help page says:
https://selz.com/support/what-is-the-best-size-for-my-image/
> There’s no “best size” for an item listing image
they literally don't even try to tell you any pixel dimensions to make covers to actually work.
gumroad tells you dimensions you are supposed to use, they just don't really work.
gumroad is blatantly broken on iphone 6s. if you click the individual product on the store page, under the cover image you get a bunch of extra whitespace. and if you try to scroll down on it, sometimes you scroll the background page instead of front content.
the saddest thing is iPhones work fine with desktop sites. if they'd just delete all their special mobile code it'd work better.
(btw i am currently being penalized by google for my decision to not have special mobile code on my websites. it made them work better than before, but also made google's very inaccurate algorithm think they aren't optimized for mobile)
on the other hand i really really don't want to deal with managing my own store where i have to track who bought what and let them download it. i don't wanna implement all this stuff myself. that seems like a terrible idea.
seems like the options are either outsource this to grossly incompetent people, or do a ton of work myself to reimplement a common thing tons of people want that makes no sense not to mass produce.
it's sad that e.g. "let people sell a pdf online" is the kind of thing the world hasn't really figured out yet.
thoughts?
Elliot Temple
Get my philosophy newsletter:
www.fallibleideas.com/newsletter
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