Flickr Homecoming + Proposal

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Some great news, and a proposal:

Possibly thanks to a squeaky-wheel tweet that broke the camel's back, after a ~3-year absence, the singularly–typographically-useful Notes feature in Flickr is back! You can add rectangles to images, attaching comments to them. Here's an example. (As an aside, that's my most favorite Group on Flickr.)

To me this is a godsend in terms of critiquing fonts, pointing out something interesting in signage, etc.

Of course we can individually use Notes to our heart's content, but what if TypeDrawers had its own official Group, encouraging people asking for font critiques and such to post there? That way people can easily comment on specifics. Just a thought.

Tiffany Wardle

I think if a person wishes to share an image via Flickr so that they can get notes that is entirely up to them. But I think an official TypeDrawers group would have to be driven by other people. Personally I never enjoyed having to go elsewhere just to see an image when we were all on Typophile. I think it is better to keep images here and make notice that people are free to download the image and doodle on it if it helps.  

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Keeping images/PDFs here is a very good point. And of course managing an external [quasi-]official resource takes extra "man"power.

But as somebody who has [had to] "manually" mark up specimens for companies, Reading students, and random favor-askers, I can tell you that something like Flickr Notes saves a lot of time; you can even cascade notes, facilitating a multi-party exchange about a given feature. Also, it would be nice to have a handy visual repository of critiques on/from TD.

Of course using something like Flickr Notes shouldn't be mandatory, and in any case at least a static image or a PDF should definitely be included on-site; but I think at a minimum it would be helpful to mention the singular usefulness of Flickr Notes in the header of: http://typedrawers.com/discussion/131/read-this-before-posting-a-new-critique-thread

BTW it's not just for critiques; as I mention above it's also useful for pointing out things in photographs of lettering, etc.

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I'm currently testing a Flickr group towards this end; I will report back here, and see if TD admin might like to at least add a mention to it. Also, if/when it gets going I wouldn't mind ceding administrative control of that group to TD if needed.