╠ Manifest Case - Avatars ╣

As most of you know I am now the branding officer for Melbourne Anime Festival. Recently I proposed that on the main site we should have a set of matching avatars for each user to post their own news. Being Manifest everyone, including those without any understanding of any of the factors involved began weighing in and the question was raised over whether this was worth it. In order to prevent this continuing I wrote a wall of text to argue my point. I thought I would share it here first of all to get your opinion of whether I'm arguing for the right side and also whether my knowledge to back it up was sufficient. Enjoy,

Daniel mentioned the voice of Manifest. This is exactly what this is avoiding. Manifest is a company, otherwise known as a soulless entity. Try as hard as you might but building relaionships with a soulless entity can be a bit of a hard task because communication with it is impersonal and often one way. This is a bad thing. People's opinion of Manifest is not limited to just the festival everything before and after it is included in this. Having a crap Manifest the previous year can be turned into a good experience if the Manifest they are exposed to online is a good one. Clearly what defines this is moc.

Now the online interaction is predominantly one on one and in the past it has been sufficiently lacking. Moc isn't accessible online. All of the members aren't on the website and the main website has just been a dumping ground for news posted under a single relatively faceless account due to Peppa-chan not being utilized as an actual character. Moc and the site are considered exclusive. My goal here is to partially remove that and to integrate MOC into the website. This is because so far very few people who aren't connected know anything about moc other than it's the group that runs things 'round here.

Using the avatars personalizes the online interaction. News is posted by a person, not by the soulless Manifest entity. It brings Moc into the website, you see the news, see the poster and begin to think of the people behind everything. Knowing that actual people are working and working hard for something is a positive thing and makes you think of committee as more than 'Those bastards that raise the prices every year'.

They need to be specially made because that is how you get them to best represent the person. Generators fail at this because first off what you think you look like can be inaccurate and also generators despite how big their libraries are, are always limited. Plus by being used elsewhere they no longer become the manifest style and instead are simply that thing that those guys stole and used for themselves cos they're lazy.

If we do it right people will notice it. However the effect of it is subconscious. You speak of resources as if it is something limited, which at the moment it isn't. All this is doing is asking one committee member to donate their time in order to do a few little pictures. If a committee member cannot spare the time then they won't do it. The resources used are zero. In fact more resources would have been used in this entire discussion.