Talking About Tumblr’s Interface
When we introduce a new feature on Tumblr and announce it on our staff blog, we usually illustrate that feature in the form of an animated GIF, isolating it as much as possible in a short, repeating form to make its function easily understandable at first glance.
The illustrative language we use for these graphics is a chunkier, sometimes dimensional version of Tumblr that blends the visual style we use in our brand communications with actual UI elements from the web product and the apps. This allows us to remove the parts of the UI that aren’t immediately relevant to the subject matter and focus on the ones that are. It also lets us take some liberty with the details without it reading as a misrepresentation.
The actual amount of liberty we take ranges from nearly literal representations of the UI to entirely symbolic illustrations of the concepts behind features. For example, our post introducing the search feature on blogs depicted a pretty literal series of actions that explained the feature by demonstration:
Parts of the dashboard interface that aren’t immediately relevant to this demonstration (particularly text and icons) are abstracted into simple shapes in order to reduce visual noise, while maintaining their familiar location so that the context of the new feature is clear.
In some cases, the message we’re trying to convey would be more effectively communicated (and is more likely to be re-shared) by a more over-the-top conceptual approach, like this image created to promote Facebook and Twitter integration when it was added to the Tumblr app:
And sometimes, it’s useful to use a combination of both approaches. When we announced embeddable posts, we used a simplified version of the dashboard in combination with a conceptual demonstration of an embeddable post leaving the dashboard and living on different places on the internet:
Freedom to remove, isolate, and sometimes symbolically represent things helps us to talk about features in a memorable way. It’s also more fun. We notably stay away from a utopian, “making the world a better place” sort of sentiment when talking about new features. The tone of Tumblr’s brand communications is purposely kind of weird and fun, because so is Tumblr.