Reopen a Question? Bad wording bred misunderstanding

Question

This question:

Are there gaming and movies galleries?

Was closed as off topic.

I think the reason it was closed are because gaming and movies are off topic, however I think he's designing something related to gaming and movies stylistically perhaps and was wondering if there was any base for inspiration about those two elements to assist with the design. Design related nonetheless. Reopen?

I read the question as: "Need to draw inspiration from movies and games for a project (perhaps logo, website etc.) Are there any good places I can find images related to the two topics to help with the design?"

Closing this question is like closing a question about designing a mechanic's website because mechanic's aren't design related... websites are though...

The user's bad wording gave this situation life however I think his question is still valid.

Update:

The main points here are as follows. Credit @koiyu

I think questions "Where can I find X, just for inspiration?" are too tangential to be really useful. Inspiration for anything can come from anywhere.

If we drop off the "for inspiration" in the current form of the question, it still has the following problems:

• No focus: gaming and movie are distinct subjects
• Too broad, even when choosing one
• It lacks the definition of what kind of a design the poster is up to
  • website design could get something from game menu design
  • poster design could get something from, well, movie poster design
• The question show zero research effort

However my response to this is as follows.

The user is obviously young (on the site), with low reputation and that implies he's not a regular user and because his questions are closed he's now unlikely to become a regular user. If he was helped out and encouraged to post correctly then he, in time, could become a regular contributing user. I agree with @koiyu, but the action shouldn't be to close, it should be to improve.

Answer 1

I think questions "Where can I find X, just for inspiration?" are too tangential to be really useful. Inspiration for anything can come from anywhere.

If we drop off the "for inspiration" in the current form of the question, it still has the following problems:

• No focus: gaming and movie are distinct subjects
• Too broad, even when choosing one
• It lacks the definition of what kind of a design the poster is up to
  • website design could get something from game menu design
  • poster design could get something from, well, movie poster design
• The question show zero research effort

Should the question have a well-defined focus, the question could be useful (at least for the OP). Now the question is off-topic at worse and not a real question at best.

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Looking at the bright side of things: if graphicdesign.se should become MAJOR and de facto source of list questions and inspiration, it might have good consequences on the blogosphere. Imagine: why would any design-blogger like to post another "34 CSS-tricks" or "51 water faucets for your designing inspiration" article when everyone would know that the exact same content could be found on graphicdesign.se?

Answer 2

I went back and forth on this before closing it but decided to close it in the end. The reason why I closed it is because there isn't a direct application to design, at least in terms of the types of questions that are being asked here. In other words, this kind of question is historically out of character for the site. The given topic is very subjective, and I think we, as a community, need to decide if and how we want to allow subjective questions.

There is a clear case to be made on closing questions of this type, because we really don't want to be inundated with extremely low-level, overly simple, and broad questions. But we get those now with all of the how-to and "What font is this?" questions we have now. My take is that we are going to get these anyway, and we need to sort out the simplest yet most effective way of handling them. I'm still on the fence over whether to close them or take a "wait and see" approach.

Upon reflection, a better action would have been to leave the question open but mark it as community wiki, but even then it is still very broad. I'll re-open it anyway and see what kind of reaction it garners. I may have erred on the side of curation a bit too much here.

Answer 3

OOOOOOOOOOOooooookay...

It seems the user finally posted clarification. I was wrong. It was a question that doesn't belong here:

I thought this was closed, thanks for re-opening, @daniel I am not looking for anything specific, I was just wondering if there are website like designshack.co.uk which only deal with movie images/effects/characters

@Koiyu and @Philip Regan are right, I was wrong. Dammit.

However, my point still stands - an attempt should have been made to clarify before closing, maybe the way I read the question could have been correct and then my point would have been very valid. I bet I look great right now ;)

Answer 4

Personally, I don't mind seeing poorly worded questions and normally just try to clean them up and make them understandable. (We've had another recent question that started out difficult to read but ended up being a good question.)

In the case of this question, I can't tell what Aurel is asking. It can be interpreted the way Daniel Hanly reads it, but I think it could be interpreted other ways as well. Since it could garner many different answers for many different interpretations, I'm hesitant to clean it up and instead voted to close it.

@Philip Regan- If you close the question, can the original poster clean it up before flagging it for re-open? Or does it have to be open for them to edit it?