The Casual Webcartoonist

February 14, 2010

Weekend Smallish Tip: Animation

Filed under: Design, Graphic Files, Weekend Smallish Tip — Tags: , , , — crfh @ 12:12 pm

You’ll probably have to make an exception with ad banners  (everybody likes money, right?) but for the rest, yes. Try to avoid animation in your page, especially around the area designated for your comic. Animation results in distraction, and you don’t want things jumping and skipping around when people is reading your work. They won’t be able to concentrate properly. Animation means flash that moves or “breathes” or “pulses”, marquees, animated gifs, stuff that automatically scrolls, etc.

For the same reason, and EVEN taking in account we all like money and need money for like food and whores rent. There are some terrible ads in some networks, you know which ones. The ones that FLASH at you with colors that are probably only found inside Cthulu’s gaze, with some idiocy about being the 137637429847923873 visitor <– more on this later. These ads are simply not worth it. They pay very little and they annoy and drive your readers away. Skip them, ban them, BLOCK them. From existence.

January 16, 2010

Weekend Smallish Tip: Click

Filed under: Design, Weekend Smallish Tip — Tags: , , , — crfh @ 12:58 pm

On weekends, I think I’ll just put a tip that doesn’t require a lot of explanations. So here it is:

Goes to show you, you’re always learning something. While browsing the archives of americanelf.com in my Ipod Touch, I realized how convenient is to click the comic image to advance to the next comic page.

Smart phones screens are tiny, and sometimes navigation buttons are too small for your fingers (in the case of the Ipod Touch, for example). I suppose it’s easier with a stylus, but still, not as convenient.

So in order to make my comics more smart-phone friendly, I implemented the clicking-on-comic as an additional “next” button. Do it too! One less hoop for the reader to jump through!

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