You may know that when adding stories to this group, you'll be adding them to the appropriate folders, as well as your own folder, and adding a ribbon to the stories comments, preferably with a comment about why you liked it. (If it's your story, just add it to your folder, not the others.)

As it happens, since this group is still coming together, I don't have an official ribbon yet, but I was planning on having a choice of a few ribbons up to the person adding it, so I'm adding a few of the ones I'd been playing with so far for use here. If you want to use a variation with a different color scheme or a different filly scout in the center, add the modified version here, so it is in the list.

http://s19.postimg.org/ty3obpss3/ribbon_filly_scout_yellow_orange.png
http://s19.postimg.org/9f8s6neur/ribbon_filly_scout_yellow2.png

--arcum42

4026433

There's always this one!

--Sweetie Belle

Here's the two I've been playing with.

They're a little dark, but I like the colors fitting with the scout theme.

I'm glad to see the old Twilight's Library group lives on. In keeping with the spirit of things, I've updated my ribbon for the new group. The design is similar, of course, but I rounded out the angles on the bottom to give the chevron a little bit of a curve.

There are some issues with it right now. The text isn't kerned properly, and the book vector is poor quality. (I need the original vector to do it right.) If we decide to use it I'll fix those problems.

Of course, since the group is changing, it might be a good time to rethink the ribbon style to match with FiMFiction's layout. In order to fit better in story descriptions, I've attempted a military award style. I'm not entirely happy with it, but you get the idea.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

4071286

While more of a successor to TL, I'm glad to see you here. As you can probably tell, the ribbons I have so far are all based on my retracing the base of your TL ribbon in Paint Tool Sai and modifying it. that curve does look pretty good, and the text is a lot better. Text always was a weak point, since Paint Tool Sai doesn't actually have a text tool (though the alpha of version 2 does).

I'd been thinking of trying it with yellow text, actually, but I got swept away with getting everything else ready for the reboot.

That military award style is interesting. I'd be curious what people think of it.

As far as the book, while sai format's not exactly readable by just about anything else, here's two pngs.

http://i.imgur.com/taVeb7p.png

http://i.imgur.com/9LzF1UW.png

I vectored both the fillies and book myself, tracing them from a screenshot...

--arcum42

With the award bars, it would be possible for FiMFiction to implement a feature where groups could upload them (in a fixed, standard size) and then "award" them to stories, either individually or to all stories in the group. The stories' descriptions could then show all of these ribbons, or at least the ones that the author chooses to show, on the description page. Since they would be a designated size, FiMFiction could display them in a standard format, with links to the original groups.

In order to be specific, the striped bar is called a "Service Ribbon" or sometimes "Ribbon Bar." (Wikilink)

I'll write a message to Knighty to see if he might consider doing this.

4072421
I know that The Royal Guard at one point had been considering such an idea, assigning automatic awards for fics approved by their group. I don't know if they ever contacted Knighty about the idea, or if it was in planning stages only.

I think the big hurdle would be in justifying the value added by an automated award process, given that stories already have the "Featured In" box for groups, and that this can be user-configured to show/hide groups. There's certainly a number of groups who could leverage the feature, like Tag-a-Long, TRG, maybe RCL or SA if we weren't lazy gits, The Achievement Brigade, etc. But, Devil's Advocate, the new system could get pretty noisy if it was available to all groups. And, if the feature is only made available to air-quotes "special" groups, that'll probably affect how high Knighty prioritizes the feature.

4071286

I've attempted a military award style

I like the interesting new spin. Also, considering the scout theming of the new group, you could potentially look to the RL counterparts for inspiration. I can't speak for the Girl Scouts, but at least in terms of the Boy Scouts, you're looking at small patches, circular or oval, fairly simple designs considering they're physically small and have RL constraints.

Ranks are ovals. I'd probably recommend against cribbing too heavily off the design of Eagle Scout (far right) just since it's a fairly prestigious award. But looking at First Class (fourth from the left) is a good level of complexity.

A few example merit badges. Circular, clear thematic tie-in toward what the badge was earned for. Thinking about it, these were basically the icons for video game achievements, before achievement were invented.

4072612 Actually, the existing group system would tie in very nicely with this. If the ribbon was the width of the group list, it could appear as a nice vertical stack of ribbons. You could also limit the number of ribbons shown, similar to what the group list already does.

The only question is whether or not the group itself would also be shown. On one hand, showing only the ribbon would make the group name less obvious, but showing both the ribbon and the group icon would be redundant. If you did this, ribbons would be better suited for special awards within the group, rather than just group badges. The other solution would be to show the group name next to or under each ribbon, effectively replacing the group's icon with its ribbon. That would make the ribbons less prestigious and to me it seems less appealing.

4072698 Circular or oval would also work. There are quite a few fun possibilities.

4072698
4073147

We actually were discussing possibly having merit badges as well as ribbons, where the merit badges were just awarded to fanfics that excel in a particular category, but since it was something extra that didn't have to be up and running when I created the group, in the interest of time, we'd put deciding on it on hold until later, and we hadn't quite started discussing it again yet.

Another thing that was under discussion was having multiple versions of the ribbon, potentially with multiple different fillies in the circle. That's one reason why I went ahead with just having people pick one of several ones we'd put together. We don't have to do that, but it seemed like a nice touch.

--arcum42

4071286

I like the military style one.

Just updated the two ribbons in the first post to urls that work.

--arcum42