OK so Lunar Revel Veigar up there is an exception, most pieces DO have a credit on them (you might wanna fix this one ASAP), but the problem is those credits don’t do a very good job of spotlighting the artist. Yes, the work should speak for itself, but you believe me when I say that it will, and allowing the artist more room to express themselves outside of the work won’t distract from it.

Taking one random example: A Halloween Over Piltover by Speeh. This is what the site’s credits mostly look like. A “name” which is most often an online handle and then a link to an online gallery. This is what I would describe as “the bare minimum,” which typically isn’t good enough for Riot.

One problem is that an artist’s name on one site often doesn’t translate to another. If Speeh has a Twitter for instance it might not be under the name Speeh, nor their instagram, website or online portfolio. And if the artist should ever choose to go by a different handle, a single link to a deviantART (which may also be abandoned or cease updating) can leave works “orphaned” from the artist who created them.

This is of course a risk no matter what you do, but one way to guard against it is redundancy: the more links to various profiles used be an artist you have, the better the chances that at least ONE of them will remain active even years later, or will point anyone interested enough to go looking in the right direction.

Another problem is… who the hell is “Speeh”? Much like a museum only shows the barest minimum about the artists whose work are on display (“Nude on beach”, John Q. Nobody, oil on canvas), the fanart showcase offers the artists who submit their work very little opportunity to present or promote themselves.

So, one quick photoshopping later, I’ve mocked up a more comprehensive description that offers artists more opportunities to show off their skill and professionalism and plug their online presence.

All of these things should be OPTIONAL for artists to input when submitting, not mandatory, and obviously you’d need character limits and word-filters to avoid people vandalizing things.

A description allows the artist to present the work in their own voice, and comment on inspirations, ideas and creation process — thus allowing them to make themselves more personal to the viewer than a simple name-tag. Allowing input of work-time and what tools were used gives the artist an opportunity to show off their skills (and for other artists, knowing what tools were used is often an interesting treat!). A little self-descriptive blurb helps artists self-promote as well, and a fuller range of options for plugging websites and social media would be nice, and the ability to plus commission information specifically would be HIGHLY useful for working artists.

Also, since it’s highly likely one artist will end up with more than one piece in the gallery at some point, some sort of internal artist-tagging system to collect and display it for those interested would be good.

SEARCHING FOR A SEARCH FUNCTION

This simply isn’t good enough.

Oh my god this simply isn’t good enough.

Now I realize it’s a major burden on data entry but the filter functionality has to be expanded significantly and it really seriously needs to be accompanied with a proper search function.

At the very least allow searches by title and artist name — this gives people a chance, if they find something cool in there but forget who made it — to go and look it up again.

My suggestion would be to follow in the footsteps of sites like deviantART and make it mandatory for artists to do some of the tagging work as part of the submission process. As a bare minimum, make them tag which champions are in the piece, and then have them categorize their piece into some wide categories, like for instance whether it’s digital art or traditional art or mixed media. After that, I think it’d be fine to provide some optional tagging options like illustration, comic, wallpaper, etc. though best to keep them somewhat limited to avoid spreading works too thin across categories.

Secondly, please oh PLEASE rework the champion filtering. There are 130+ champions and if I want to browse fanart of, say, Malzahar, I have to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and it is TREMENDOUSLY frustrating.

My poor, abused middle finger…

If I want to filter multiple champions (like, oh, say Taric and Ezreal) I have to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to find Ezreal, and then I have to click back into it AGAIN to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to find Taric.

Look, I get it, the tiled rows of champion splashes look really nice and appealing, but they are a TERRIBLE browsing experience. Please just do an alphabetized list or a dropdown menu. These things have already been solved in web-design, don’t overthink them.

And finally…

QUALITY… CONTROL?

Curation is good. Allowing community input is good. Originality is good.

Theoretically, it’s all good, so this is not so much a criticism as a warning. Personal anecdote time!

I spent some years as a moderator of a Danish art-forum. Job of the moderators included sifting through submissions before they got displayed on the site to filter out porn and low-quality content. We’d then rank each submission from 1–10 as a measure of “technical quality,” i.e. not by whether we liked it but whether something was technically well-made. Artwork would then be sorted on the site according to its average score after a number of ratings had been done.

What happened, though, was that VERY CONSISTENTLY, “high art”, like paintings, graphite portraits and realistic illustration, would be ranked higher than “pop art” like cartoons, anime- and manga inspired works, comics and fanart. This happened across the board, and very often “high art” work that was executed with less skill and less time-investment than “pop art” would end up with a higher rating across the board.

Now, we were a very diverse board of moderators — I work in illustration, cartoons and comics, others did paintings and realistic pencil art, still others were did abstracts and etc — and we all had good critical eyes and communicated plenty about standards. But as it turns out, there are cultural mores about what kinds of art are “high culture” and which aren’t, what types of art are silly and frivolous and which are meaningful, and they are more powerful than you think. They influence how we judge quality, they influence how we judge the “worth” of a piece. And to be honest, I think I already see them at work in the fanart gallery.