Attention, design nerds.
One of favorite people at tumblr is Peter Vidani, who overlords one of the most important and interesting groups at the company. As you can read in the interview below, design at tumblr has a significantly different role than at most Silicon Valley tech companies. The disparity has a lot to do with the company’s roots in New York City (rather than engineering centric Northern California) and even more about the vision of founder/CEO David Karp.
Peter Vidani on the Evolution of the Tumblr Dashboard
Ministry of Design senior minister Peter Vidani lays hands on every aspect of Tumblr’s visual and usage aesthetic. Initially contracted to work on theme creation, he came aboard full-time in 2009 and has steadily advanced his design philosophy of utility and simplicity. One of his primary, perpetual obsessions could be considered the real face of Tumblr: the Dashboard.
![Why don’t more animators use tumblr?
Of course, I have a vested interested in tumblr (I’m on their board and the company was incubated in the Frederator/NY office), and I moved all of our Wordpress blogs over to the platform last spring. But I keep wondering why more animators don’t use the platform? Some young artists are using it, but for some reason a ton of animation blogs are on Blogger, some on Wordpress.
But, there were some compelling reasons that we moved which I think could really benefit more animator sites. (from below: “Tumblr is a visual medium [more than half of the 25 million things posted on Tumblr each day are pictures]). What I mostly like about it is that’s it social. Meaning? More people see and share our posts than ever before, by a factor that I would guess is as much as 1000x (!).
…:::Updated relevant stat from the post below: California is the state with the biggest number of unique tumblr users, 10 million!
For instance, our biggest tumblr success the Adventure Time tumblr. Currently we’re at almost 100,000 follower (double, triple exclamation!!!) and almost every post is liked or reblogged (“notes” in tumblr jargon) hundreds of times. Earlier this week one of our background images leapt from 300 “notes” to over 20,000 once it was featured on thetumblr dashboard Radar. Very few of the posts get fewer than hundreds of notes (you can see the number at the bottom of each post.) Regular readers will recall that very, very, very few of our posts got even one comment on our old blogs.
My diatribe is prompted by the post below from Poynter.org, the journalism site; Tumblr’s media wizard/evangelist Mark Coatney stopped by there today to give a few pointers about how to use tumblr more effectively. It made me think about the platform in relationship to our industry.
Animators could learn a lot to help get *a lot* more people to see their stuff.
fredseibert reblogged markcoatney:
Thanks to everyone who stopped by today’s Poynter chat about Tumblr for journalists (and more thanks to Mallary and Joe for having me!)
BEST PRACTICESThe Tumblr community very much rewards authenticity, originality and social graces. I always reduce this to:
Be Engaging: Have interesting things to say, and don’t talk simply about yourself. Respond to other Tumblr users, ask questions, etc. Remember that Tumblr is a visual medium (more than half of the 25 million things posted on Tumblr each day are pictures), so look for compelling images to tell your story whenever possible.
Be Social: Tumblr is above all a social sharing platform. Use this space to show off your best stuff, encourage others to share it with their followers, reblog posts from other Tumblrs that you think your followers will enjoy.
Be Yourself: No publication has to fundamentally change who they are to connect with people on Tumblr. The audience responds most to a personal, peer-to-peer connection with you; embrace that.
THE COMMUNITYMore than 105 million people worldwide see Tumblr blogs every month (43 million U.S.). Tumblr currently serves 13.3 billion pageviews every month; this time last year that was less than 2 billion. RIght now there are 35 million Tumblr blogs; at the current rate (nearly 3 million new blogs every month) we expect to have more than 70 million Tumblr blogs by this time next year. Those Tumblr bloggers are creating more than 45 million new posts every day.
Top 10 US DMAs and monthly unique users of Tumblr blogs, October 2011: New York: 5.2 million Los Angeles: 4.3 million San Fran/Oakland: 3.7 million Washington, DC: 1.9 million Chicago: 1.8 million Philadelphia: 1.7 million Atlanta: 1.6 million Seattle: 1.5 million Boston: 1.4 million Dallas: 1.3 million
Top 10 US states and monthly unique users of Tumblr blogs, October 2011:California: 10 million New York: 4.4 million Texas: 3.6 million Florida: 3.1 million Illinois: 2.1 million Pennsylvania: 2 million New Jersey: 2 million Georgia: 1.9 million Washington: 1.7 million Virginia: 1.6 million Ohio: 1.5 million
USE CASESWashington Post Innovations This is the best example of a Tumblr blog stitched into the fabric of the publication’s existing Website. The Post’s Innovations Tumblr blog has all the community and sharing functionality of a Tumblr blog, and it carries the navigation, look and feel, and advertising of a traditional Washingtonpost.com pagehttp://on.washingtonpost.com/T MagazineOne of our favorite things about the T magazine Tumblr is that it’s big. Very, very big; the pictures are the star here, and they’re shown off in a way that’s hard to do on many traditional Websites. Nice voice, clean look, compelling images.http://tmagazine.tumblr.com/
GQGQ launched in November with a Tumblr blog that has quickly become one of the best, most original and most talked-about of the media Tumblrs.Best uses: GQ uses the ‘ask’ feature better than anyone we’ve seen to create a real dialogue with readershttp://gq.tumblr.com
CNN Money TechThe idea of this really nice group Tumblr blog is that in every newsroom reporters email interesting tidbits and commentary around; this in essence puts the Tumblr audience on that email chain:http://cnnmoneytech.tumblr.com
ProPublica: Officials Say the Darndest ThingsThe problem for ProPublica was that as a non-profit news org, they had to be careful to not be seen as opinionated or partisan on Tumblr. The solution is this unique Tumblr blog of quotes from public officials that takes advantage of Tumblr’s community and content distribution features. http://officialssay.tumblr.com
The Gun: CJ ChiversExcellent example of a journalist providing really great reporting from his individual Tumblr blog: http://cjchivers.com
Find an incomplete list of media outlets and journalists here; please email additions to me.
THEMES Art She Said: A project from Ann Taylor; when the promotion ended Tumblr users were allowed to install the theme from the project on their own Tumblr bloghttp://www.tumblr.com/theme/18357
APIGuardian SXSW coverageUses the Tumblr API to pull in posts from multiple Tumblr bloggers in a single space on the Guardian’s website:http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/sxsw-2011-live-coverage](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvgc424ubU1qbr6kxo1_500.gif)
