I started my very own webcomic. I decided, on the 3rd of January, that I would get some webspace and expand from my research oriented blog and publish my comics to the public. One month later, it was live. Now, it's all set up and running fine.
First of all, I had the idea that for the website's design to hand-draw the whole website. I do have a few words typed in, but it was mostly in case someone couldn't read my handwriting. The website is simple. That's all I wanted, simplicity and with a sensation of the website being an odd mix of hand drawn design on a purely digital publishing medium. I really like that contrast of digital perfectly solid black line and the pen drawn "black" line which had the waves, strengths, weaknesses, and swerves of black ink, being so perfectly imperfect.
The website is constructed on the basic webcomic template after studying other webcomic website designs. The main inspiration in its simplicity was XKCD. Although my website has very specific originalities which can easily be overlooked but has great impact on the actual content, impact and delivery of the webcomics. The website has only 3 pages: home (where the comic browser is), archives (to find speicific comics) and info (where I briefly explain what I am doing and leave my author's email - fnic@stickmencomics.com). The main impact of the website design on the comics is the home page on which I allocated a browser space which has a width of 595 pixels. It just happens I chose that width because it is the pixel equivalent width of A4 paper. Added to that, the only design "perk" I added to my website were the sidebars which impose a certain height for the browser. All in all, I purposely limited my publishing area for my comic books to A4 or "letter" size comics. Most of the webcomics I have viewed have their own self-imposed format, although largely favoured layout is in "strip" format, or landscape.
The technical difficulty is the viewer has to scroll down to see the whole comic. It has up sides and down sides. The main up side is that the down side of the comic isn't visible. This allows for an effective delivery of the punchline. That is a worry because the text is as important of as the art. Therefore it is important to get the viewer to read the last part of the comic last. On the really down side is that on a small screen, say a 15" with 800x600 resolution, the whole website isn't visible. I considered that, then I thought: "people who still use those screens are: 1/at work, 2/ using a very old home computer screen". Therefore I decided to continue with my project the way it was thinking that demographic of readers wouldn't exactly be those who read my webcomics.
The archive cause me a bit of grief. It was the hardest decision to take, not because of technical advise but mainly because of design practicalities and layout. The archive has to make it easy for one to find a specific webcomic quickly, which also keeping loading time into consideration. Flash could have done the job but now more and more security systems block flash. Thumbnails would have been too network heavy, and a browser would have the process too long. Thus my choice of a unique list, as used on XKCD, but organised and laid out in a more specific and user friendly way. My only question that remains is: "should I keep the sidebars and if so, should I impose a heigh limit on the table enabling a scroll bar on inside the actual archive?". I still have not made up my mind.
My webcomics can be found on my website: http://www.stickmencomics.com
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