Look at any set of real query logs and a particular pattern shows up constantly: searches that are two or three characters long, cut off mid-word, or clearly typed with a thumb on a moving train. This is not carelessness. It is what searching looks like when the device is small, the hand is one, and the attention is partial.
Almost everything about how creative work gets presented online was designed by people sitting at desks, and it shows. Understanding the actual reading situation changes a series of small decisions that together determine whether anybody finds anything.
Queries get abandoned mid-word
Autocomplete means a reader often stops typing as soon as a suggestion appears, which produces truncated queries in the logs and, more importantly, means the suggestion list is doing most of the work. Whatever a system suggests after three characters is what most readers will actually search for.
For a creator this means the beginning of a title or a series name matters disproportionately, because that is what gets matched during partial typing. A distinctive first word is worth more than a distinctive last one, which is a small consideration with a real effect on discovery.
Two taps is the budget
Readers abandon navigation quickly on phones. Anything more than about two taps from an entry point loses most of the audience, which means deep hierarchies of categories and subcategories are close to useless. Flat structures with good search work considerably better.
The practical version for an artist's own site is a single index page listing everything, with the newest first, and a search box. That sounds primitive and it outperforms elaborate navigation consistently, because it removes the need to guess where anything has been filed.
Text and tap targets
Body text below about sixteen pixels causes phones to zoom or readers to squint, and anything tappable smaller than roughly forty-four pixels is a target most thumbs miss. These are not aesthetic preferences; they are measured thresholds, and work presented below them loses readers who never mention why they left.
The same applies to work itself. Lettering in comics sized for print becomes unreadable on a phone, which is the argument made in the piece on panel rhythm. Testing at phone width before finishing is a habit worth building for every kind of output.
Images load slowly on real connections
Creators test on fast connections and readers frequently are not on one. A gallery that loads twelve full-resolution images at once is a gallery a proportion of readers never see, because they leave before it finishes. Sensible thumbnails and progressive loading are unglamorous and they materially change how many people see the work.
This also affects the archive question, since it argues for keeping high-resolution masters privately and publishing appropriately sized versions, as covered in the piece on archiving your own work.
The reading situation is not a desk
Beyond the technical, the context matters. Phone reading happens in short intervals, often interrupted, frequently in public where a reader may be conscious of a screen being visible. That argues for work that survives being read in pieces and for interfaces that do not announce themselves loudly.
It also argues for making the first image or first page carry more than usual, since it may be the only one a reader sees on a given occasion. That is a compositional consideration as much as a technical one.
Reading order on a narrow screen is worth checking as well, because layouts that are clear at full width often reflow into something the designer never saw. A caption that sat beside an image can end up several screens below it, and a two-column comparison can collapse into two unrelated lists. Opening your own pages at phone width once a month catches this in a minute and prevents readers from meeting a version of the work nobody ever approved.
Presenting work for the device people actually use
Flat navigation, a search box, distinctive first words in titles, readable text sizes, generous tap targets, sensibly sized images and a strong first page. None of it is difficult, and together it is the difference between work that can be found and read and work that technically exists online.
Our own presentation standards are described in the editorial principles.