Pictures

Every article gets a cover and, unless you turn them off, a picture every screen or two inside. All of it is set in one place: Pictures, in Style & settings. A new site's pictures are picked for it: a look that suits its kind of business, drawn in its colours, with no title baked into the cover. A site that was already running keeps the pictures it had; the Pictures card offers the picked ones with Use them, and Not now puts the offer away.

How a picture is made

Before anything is drawn, an art-direction step reads the article the way a magazine's art director reads a feature: the title, what each illustrated section actually says, your business, your readers, and your own notes. For every picture it writes one concrete scene — the work itself, never a metaphor for it — in words an illustrator could work from without asking a question. It is told what your recent pictures showed, so it does not draw the same desk twice, and it can leave a section without a picture when one would add nothing.

Screens, sheets of paper and signs in a scene carry abstract blocks in place of words, so a picture never has misspelt lettering in it. Products the article names are photographed from their real websites rather than drawn.

Your colours

Every cover and picture is drawn in three colours: a main colour, an accent and a background tone. They are read off your site when your brief is drafted — its theme colour, logo, icon and stylesheet — and shown under Your colours in Style & settings, where you can change any of them. A colour you choose is never replaced by a later read; Read my site again reads them afresh when you ask. Until your site can be read, pictures use a stand-in colour taken from your site's name.

If your picture notes name colours (for example "our green #1f7a5a"), the Pictures card offers Use as my colours to make them your colours in one press.

Look

Six tiles, each one picture drawn for your own site in your colours, so you choose by looking rather than by reading a name. The one marked Recommended is picked for your kind of business (a real-looking photograph for firms, agencies, clinics, venues and shops; watercolour for counselling and personal services; flat illustration or soft 3D for software) and is what a new site starts on. The samples are drawn once, the first time the card opens, and kept; they are not redrawn when you change your notes.

• Editorial illustration — flat, calm, magazine-grade.
• Line art — ink lines on off-white paper, your colour as the one accent.
• Photograph — a real-looking editorial photograph. The only look where people may appear.
• 3D render — soft, studio-lit, matte.
• Watercolour — loose washes with the paper showing through.
• Bold graphic — your colour, big shapes, poster-like.

One look covers the whole article. The cover and the pictures inside share it, so a post is one piece of design.

The cover

Artwork is the recommended cover: drawn in your look and colours from a scene written for this article, with no title on it — your blog already prints the title above the cover.

Stock photo is a real photograph from Unsplash, found with a short search phrase the art director writes for the article rather than the raw keyword.

Designed is drawn from your colours and your site's name, with no model involved. It cannot come back wrong, and it is what any article gets if a picture cannot be drawn. Choose it and a gallery of designs appears, each rendered with your own colours and domain.

None sends articles out without a cover.

Title on the cover appears for Artwork and Stock photo. On, the title is set over the picture in a real typeface, and the picture is composed to leave room for it.

Pictures inside the article

One switch, on by default. On, the article gets about one picture every 800 words in the same look as the cover, and products the article names are screenshotted from their real websites. Off, the article carries no pictures inside.

Where a section sets out a short sequence of steps, compares two options, or states several numbers worth comparing, it can get a diagram instead of a picture: drawn by Rankbench in your colours, with the section's own words and only numbers the section states. At most two per article, and most articles have none or one. Diagrams do not count against your picture allowance.

Notes for the artist

Optional. A short note that applies to every picture, the cover and the ones inside, sent word for word to the art-direction step. This is where you say what your pictures are about and what they must never be: "Real clinicians in real practices. No stock-photo smiles."

Preview

At the bottom of the card. Preview with my next article draws the cover for your next planned title and one picture from inside your latest article, with the settings above, through the same steps a real article goes through. Nothing is drawn until you press it. A preview is kept for the settings it was drawn with, so asking again with the same settings is free; Draw another draws a fresh pair, and when you change a setting the card says so and offers Preview again. Each new picture counts against your monthly allowance like any other.

Redrawing earlier articles

When you change the look or your colours, new articles use them straight away. Articles already written keep their pictures until you press Redraw earlier pictures at the bottom of the Pictures card. Every article drawn before the change gets new pictures in the current look, newest first, a couple at a time, about a minute each, and the card shows how far it has got; you can leave the page. Your words are not touched. Copies on your Rankbench blog get the new pictures; copies already sent to another CMS keep their old ones there.

A redraw stops before it uses the pictures your next articles need and says so. Press again next month for the rest.

Changing a cover after the fact

If a cover or a picture came back wrong, the day page has Not the one? → Redraw the pictures. It takes our pictures out of the article, draws a new cover and new pictures in your current look and notes, and leaves every word as it was. About half a minute, and it spends from the same monthly allowance as a new article. If a copy has already gone to your CMS, that copy keeps the old pictures until you change them there.

Where images live

They are made when the article is written and kept on your own account, then sent to your CMS with the article. If images are missing from a published post, your CMS is probably refusing them; the webhook guide in connecting where it publishes covers what an endpoint has to do to accept them.

Where to go next

The day page and the editor is where you see a cover before it goes anywhere.