Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.
The Diagnosis
In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience.
Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content.
To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.
Our Guiding Principles
To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.
Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.
Provide high-quality content with every app launch.
Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.
Retain and grow our creator base.
Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.
Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.
Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.
Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.
Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up.
We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.
Actions & Next Steps
Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.
Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.
Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.
We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.
The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.
Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant.
Actions & Next Steps
Deliver great content each time the app is opened.
Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are.
Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds.
Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.
Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.
Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.
Actions & Next Steps
Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.
Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs.
Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.
Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread.
Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads.
Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed.
Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.
Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.
Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.
The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.
It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.
Actions & Next Steps
Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it.
Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.
Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.
Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.
Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.
Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.
Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.
Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.
Actions & Next Steps
Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.
Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.
Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages.
Test what the right daily push notification limit is.
Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.
Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.
The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.
Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.
Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users.
Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.
Conclusion
Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.
Hi folks! We're surprised to see how many of you think we're getting rid of the reverse-chronological dashboard or pivoting to a solely algorithmic feed. We're not! We can see how you might have come to that conclusion, so let us reassure you and clear some things up.
We have a ton of options and toggles to customize your experience. Want a reverse-chronological dashboard feed? No problem! The chronological feed is not going anywhere. Just toggle off "Best Stuff First" in your dashboard settings and scroll away. Want to see more art or fanfic of your favorite movie or show? Follow some tags and you'll find additional posts and new blogs to follow. We've had an algorithm for years—we just don't make you use it if you don't want to.
Tumblr is a place where you can tailor and customize your experience to individual preferences. With this core product strategy as guidance, we'll keep improving Tumblr for new and existing users alike.
。・ template psd one hundred eleven by templatepsds ゜+.*
-`. info .’-
+ as requested, here is a tarot card template with two different designs, both of which have either a black/gold option, or an off-white/black option.
+ to insert an image, place your picture layer above the layer titled “put image in here*,” right-click on your layer and select “create clipping mask.”
+ you can change the colors, resize it and make it smaller, etc.
+ the font used in the templates ‘OldStyle’, which you can download here.
+ not for commercial use or anything like that! just for personal use/to have fun.
For fun for my arcanacouncilrp I decided to build a tarot deck for the peeps. The rest of my deck here, the font should be readily available. It’s called Neou if you need to download it. The image should be 300 x 520 pixels. Feel free to use and edit, just don’t be rude and claim as your own or redistribute. Feel free to credit / like / reblog, but they are unnecessary.
Please note that this is a guide for complete beginners who have no idea how to get started on making moodboards. Only the very basics will be covered here.
Have you ever wanted to make a moodboard but didn’t know where to start? You have ideas but you have never edited a picture before? Can’t afford photoshop and don’t know how to use it? Look here, this guide is for you!
This guide includes: Free photoshop alternatives, where to find images, and basic tips and tricks to make your moodboard. Click the Read More below :)
Hi! I was wondering if y'all could help me. I was wondering if you knew a guide of how to make mood boards and aesthetics? I would like to make some but I'm not even sure how to get started. It would help me a great deal. Thank you so much!
A masterlist of tutorials on Character Aesthetics and Mood Boards!
A lovely anon asked for a coloring tutorial and here’s is it! My photoshop is in spanish so I added a translation in some parts that I felt it was necessary (the other stuff is pretty much in the same place) but if you have questions let me know!!
(image heavy!!)
As requested by Anonymous, I will explain how to blur out backgrounds, unnecessary characters or distracting things in your gifs, with this as our example:
(Natasha isn't an unnecessary character ok I just can't find a better example at the moment, but I hope this demonstrates it well enough 😂)
NOTE: This tutorial works best for scenes with minimal movement.
↓ LEARN HOW TO BLUR YOUR GIFS UNDER THE CUT ↓
[1] Create your gif
Make the gif like you normally would, including coloring, sharpening etc. If you don’t know how to make gifs, click here for some great tutorials.
Assuming you’ve already converted into a Video Timeline and your layers into a Smart Object in your gif making process, let’s proceed.
[2] Make sure the playhead is at the start of the timeline
If your playhead isn’t at the start of the timeline, do this before step [3], so the duplicated layer will be aligned with your gif layer, as demonstrated below:
[3] Duplicate the gif layer
Shortcut keys:
Mac: command + J
Windows: Ctrl + J
[4] Add Gaussian Blur to duplicated gif layer
With your duplicated layer (gif copy layer in the demo below) selected, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur... The radius is up to you. I used 1.5 pixels in my example.
Feel free to use the other blur options (Blur, Blur More, Box Blur, etc).
[5] Add Layer Mask to duplicated gif layer
To do this, click the square button (highlighted in pink below) beside fx at the bottom of the Layers window.
[6] Brush the parts you don't want blurred
Make sure of these before brushing:
Click the layer mask once to select it since we’ll be brushing over the layer mask, not the layer.
Have black (#000000) as your foreground color (the color in the front).
If white became the foreground color after selecting the layer mask, change it to black OR press the shortcut key X on your keyboard to switch the foreground and background colors.
The brush hardness and size are up to you.
So, with the layer mask selected, brush to remove the blur on your subject(s) like this:
TIP: If you want to blur back the parts you’ve brushed over, press the shortcut key X on your keyboard again to switch the foreground and background colors. Always make sure you have the layer mask selected.
Black foreground color: erases
White foreground color: brings back what’s been erased
〰️
Please like/reblog if this has helped you, thank you! :)
hearts and arrows gif pack
hearts and arrows style gifs for you to use in your overlays, graphics or backgrounds - or just as they are! gifs made from Youtube stock resources. please like or reblog if you intend to use - many thanks…
hi! could you tell me how u changed just wylla's hair to green in your manderly gifset? thank you so so much.
You mean this gif, correct?
There are a few ways to change hair colour on a gif, and I don’t remember how I did that one. But I’d be glad to walk you through all the methods that I know of :)
First thing you need to remember is that hair colour changes is that they work best on light colours. Changing blond and red hair is quite simple once you learn how, but black and brown hair always give me so much trouble that I don’t even attempt them.
Hi! I was wondering if y'all could help me. I was wondering if you knew a guide of how to make mood boards and aesthetics? I would like to make some but I'm not even sure how to get started. It would help me a great deal. Thank you so much!
A masterlist of tutorials on Character Aesthetics and Mood Boards!
turnnoffyourmind
baratheonpilled
gracieabrams
snowghoul
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
2087
areudirty
gummygunk
