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What is the purpose of a thumbnail?

Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 4:42 pm
by alex.barylski
I have created a slideshow consisting of some of the screen my application contains (15 in all). The slideshow is only 436x267 pixels in dimension.

At this resolution, the slides are blurry except only the largest text -- but it does give you an idea as to what the application looks like, but does not disclose the exact verbiage unless you really look.

I've done this for two reasons:

1) I want to keep the user intrigued so they sign up for a free trial account.
2) I don't competitors borrowing any ideas and a skewed slideshow is probably the best way. :P

My question then becomes. What is the purpose of thumbnails? Do they really need full size/screen equivelants?

The latter is what both my mother and father have suggested and it's obviously possible, except that the slide show would need to sop whenever they clicked a image for full view which I just feel is counter-intuitive.

It's a slideshow, it's not meant to give you a real time virtual tour, for that, I want people to signup for a free account. The slideshow is only to entice users into looking deeper into the application.

The slideshow does not really serve as a thubnail -- as the screen is substantially larger than a 40x40 thumbnail. If it intended to show how simple the interface is overall, etc...

Opinions?

Cheers :)

Re: What is the purpose of a thumbnail?

Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 5:10 pm
by alex.barylski
I figured I should show what the original slideshow thumbnails looked like and the new resized version -- which while still aliased due to resizing at least they are readable. My parents tend to think no one will buy anything they cannot see, so I'll use viewable screenshots. :P

Which do you think I should use?

Re: What is the purpose of a thumbnail?

Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 5:40 pm
by onion2k
If you want to keep text readable in a thumbnail you need to make a nice neat number. Scaling an image be exactly 1/2 or 1/4 will always return a nicer thumbnail that scaling to a set size like 200px wide. Generally with photos you can't tell except the thumbnail looks a bit blurry, but with text or vectors it's really obvious. If you're doing screenshots it should be easy because screen resolutions are always nice factors ... 1280 * 1024 shrinks nicely to 160 * 128 for example.

Re: What is the purpose of a thumbnail?

Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 5:57 pm
by alex.barylski
I believe both actually use the same aspect ratio -- which is what causes horrible results when done wrong, I know. :)

If you look at the first image though, the text is blurry. The latter is more readable.

I've decided to go with my folks advice and stick with something large and more readable.

Re: What is the purpose of a thumbnail?

Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 6:53 pm
by Benjamin
With that image in particular you could crop it because most of it is just white space anyway.

Why not offer a live demo? I know I wouldn't buy something unless I could try it so I can get a feel for how it works. That just isn't possible with pictures.

Re: What is the purpose of a thumbnail?

Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 7:06 pm
by alex.barylski
I do have a live demo -- sorta. But I also need a series of screenshots.

Cropping...I thought about it, but then the resolution gets all wacky for multiple images. I want each screen to look the same as the last (in terms of resolution, aspect ratio, etc). Otherwise the login screen would come in clean and the others would appear blurry.

Re: What is the purpose of a thumbnail?

Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2008 2:05 am
by onion2k
Redesign the site in "Web 2.0" so all the text is massive, then it'll be fine when you scale it down. :wink:

Re: What is the purpose of a thumbnail?

Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2008 3:35 am
by Jenk
onion2k wrote:If you want to keep text readable in a thumbnail you need to make a nice neat number. Scaling an image be exactly 1/2 or 1/4 will always return a nicer thumbnail that scaling to a set size like 200px wide. Generally with photos you can't tell except the thumbnail looks a bit blurry, but with text or vectors it's really obvious. If you're doing screenshots it should be easy because screen resolutions are always nice factors ... 1280 * 1024 shrinks nicely to 160 * 128 for example.
A vector is a vector because it scales perfectly, providing you keep the same aspect ratio.

Sorry to be a pedant :lol:

Re: What is the purpose of a thumbnail?

Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2008 5:00 am
by onion2k
Jenk wrote:A vector is a vector because it scales perfectly, providing you keep the same aspect ratio.
I meant a rasterised vector image obviously. Otherwise the same would be true of text as that's also vector information until you rasterise it...

Re: What is the purpose of a thumbnail?

Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2008 2:11 pm
by alex.barylski
Redesign the site in "Web 2.0" so all the text is massive, then it'll be fine when you scale it down.
Haha. I dunno about that one. :P

I did end up finding a decent scale where the screenshots are still legible and yet not full screen images hogging bandwidth.