Suggestion: Characterimageswithblackborders

Character Sheets for some works have profile shots with black borders. Many tropers including myself do not like those. The issue has been brought up in ATT several times:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/query.php?parent_id=80718&type=att https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/query.php?parent_id=73133&type=att

I believe it is time for a crowner to resolve the issue once and for all.

Opened.

I think the black borders look ugly, especially considering the caption box already acts as a border. Supposedly the Star Wars project thread decided to standardize images as 300x300px with black borders when the Expanded Universe was rebooted, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, RWBY, and Game of Thrones followed suit as an unofficial convention. EmperorMasakado, who is now suspended for changing images without Image Pickin', created the current setup on the Fullmetal Alchemist character pages, and they tried the same thing with Harry Potter, but I reverted that.

~The12thDoctor replaced the images on Characters.Frozen Anna, Characters.Frozen Elsa, and Olaf on Characters.Frozen Magical Creatures with ones from Frozen II with borders without discussion. While it's common practice to update character images when their appearances change, there's no need to add borders.

Remove the borders.

Having images with black borders is also counterintuitive to night vision cleanup.

Edited by Crossover-Enthusiast on Nov 6th 2019 at 7:19:15 AM

I’ll probably be in the minority but I don’t mind them; I think they look neat. But if they make wiki standardization or function easier somehow then I won’t mind seeing them go either (just thinking of all the franchise pages that’ll need cleaning up...).

I'm all for getting rid of the black borders.

That, to me, is one of the best arguments against them. +1 to remove.

I believe that black borders is a good idea, since it's not only neat as Synchronicity said, but it also distinguishes TV tropes from other wiki sites.

Yeah, I don't care for them, and they do look bad in Night Vision for sure.

The borders make the pages look sterile and ugly. It also makes the character images look cramped, espically since the focus seems to be on cropped torso shots.

I'd remove them. I've always found them tacky and unneeded.

Break these borders down.

Consensus seems to be favoring removal. Should we make a crowner just to make it official? (EDIT: Never mind, here's one; just noticed OP requested an official crowner)

I don't mind seeing them go, but I'm curious of who will put in the legwork for cleanup given that there are so many franchise pages that use them. Do we open a short-term project? Announce it in the discussion pages? I'm sure some users had to have liked them for them to become so widespread; those users may not have been aware of this thread so some might disagree down the line.

Edited by Synchronicity on Nov 25th 2019 at 11:24:46 AM

I don't think these are as widespread as images that need to be made transparent, so in theory, a Short-Term Project thread should be fine, but the problem is that almost nobody actually visits the Short-Term Projects Forum, so if we put the thread there, then nothing will be done.

Crowner's hooked, thanks!

Note: Many of the character sheets on DC Comics also have 'em.

Edited by Synchronicity on Nov 27th 2019 at 8:54:16 AM

While we're on the topic of "standardization" making images look worse, I reverted DarthEnderX adding blank space to the sides of the images on Mega Man X - Heroes just so they'd be 250x250px square.

EDIT: They did the same thing on Mega Man (Classic) Heroes and Mega Man (Classic) Villains, which just had their images made transparent.

Edited by rjd1922 on Nov 28th 2019 at 12:35:52 PM

I reverted most of the Mega Man images DarthEnderX changed. They previously changed the images on Super Smash Bros. - Assist Trophies to the Spirits and then edit warred. Are they suspended? They were editing regularly and abruptly stopped at the end of October.

They were suspended for that edit war and released.

Double-post: This one's decisive, let's start the de-bordering.

At Synchronity's suggestion I'm moving some points I made in the IP general thread to here, even though the crowner is closed (I didn't know this was being discussed until after everyone had said their piece...)

... on the other hand, sometimes it was very easy to get good ones because the previous image was a blurry, low-res crop of a screenshot lazily lifted from Wookiepedia.

And as I pointed out and Synchronity noted in the general thread, despite this seemingly-unanimous agreement the only person who's actually bothered to follow through on this somewhat monumental task is rjd, and only on Characters.Star Wars Anakin Skywalker, which he'd previously tried to change without discussion because he thought the 300x300 black border standard was "ugly."

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Dec 9th 2019 at 11:14:49 AM

Last couple points I want to make are rebuttals to SailorTardis's point in the thread and a point by Forenperser in the ATT:

Yeah, I'm gonna have to disagree on a lot of levels. Full-body shots are great when they're available and convenient, but for any media that doesn't release vectored stills of the characters they're going to be near-impossible to get due to how cinematography works.

We don't need to see a character's legs to get a good idea of what they look like; while I do think that there are some images in this format that are too close-up (like, just their face and a bit of shoulder, which isn't very good IMO), it's still preferable to awkwardly-sized and/or blurry screenshot crops.

Yeah, again, while I do think that there's some examples of this that are not-so-great (the current image for Characters.MCU Spider Man is probably the worst; it's just Tom Holland's face with a bunch of photoshop filters and the vaguest hint of a Spider-suit on his shoulders), the use of promo images, at least on the MCU pages, has worked pretty well IMO. They tend to be high-quality images that prominently display the latest costume in a dynamic pose; they work just fine.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Dec 9th 2019 at 11:11:30 AM

I also removed borders from a couple of RWBY and Fullmetal Alchemist character images.

I agree that waist-up/bust-up images are fine when there's no full-body render available.

Edited by rjd1922 on Dec 9th 2019 at 1:35:32 PM