Geek Life's Mirror - Asking for Critique

[Zappit]

Hey, gang. I've actually got a couple GL strips up on a Comicfury site, but I was really messing with its HTML to clean it up and streamline it. So I'd like to get some feedback on how it looks - layout, colors, logo, whatever. The link is in my sig now, and I'd appreciate hearing from everyone. I would like to improve it, work on developing my extraordinarily limited programming skills.

 

[strawman]

It's very large. While it's great to have the high resolution on big monitors (and particularly the ipad), I suggest you consider checking the user's window size or screen size and make everything fit a 1024x768 screen for those with smaller screens.

Also, I'm not digging the white space balance between the logo and the comic. There's that huge open space to the right of the logo (not to mention the logo itself is large) that seems... lonely. You may already have plans for it, but if you aren't going to implement them soon I suggest adding something. Maybe thumbnails of the previous and next comics like you see on flickr.

I'm glad you have the comic clickable to go to the next comic.

On the ipad the comic appears to be surrounded by a gray box, but not on firefox on the desktop. Don't know which is intentional.

Nice clean layout and design. I like the font choice, although I'm not sure it fits with the comic style. That's not a bad thing, but perhaps something to consider.

 

[Zappit]

Hmm. I've been working exclusively on the iPad lately, so I didn't catch the size issue. I think resizing the comics will fix that pretty easily.

I did not know about the box either. I wanted that Grey frame, but it's a no-show in Firefox, huh? I don't know if I can fix that immediately but I can research it.

I do think I'm going to add more to that logo - perhaps an image of the central three characters.

Edit. Sized them down a bit, and added what's essentially a placeholder graphic until I get a better, permanent image in there.

 

[Bowielee]

Honestly, not a fan at all of the blue in the strip or the site.

 

[drifter]

Looking at the site from my desktop in Chrome and Firefox:

I agree with stienman about the white space. Not crazy about the two different shades of blue used in the logo, either; they clash a bit. Also (and this is very nitpicky) the logo isn't fully colored in; I can see white specks, most obviously in the two top e's.

Looking at the drop shadows, it looks like there are blank strips at the top and bottom. Is that on purpose? Because it looks like a mistake to me.

Font choice: eh. Then again, I hate dealing with fonts. I will say, I feel like the links should have a heavier line weight to them.

Regarding the comic itself: the top panel, has it been resized? The lines look fuzzy, compared to how crisp it is in the rest of the comic.

 

[Zappit]

I believe that was an effect of resizing the image down to fit screens better. I'm using Strip Designer to create the pages. I have to create each panel, save it as a PNG, then insert it into the page template. Technically, each panel gets resized slightly, but it's less noticeable when the page stays at full size.

I have no idea about those strips in the drop shadow. Gotta look into that.

Shit, never caught that with the logo. That will be easy enough to fix. I should be able to get a better font for the page, too.

As for the blue, it's kind of a chapter one experiment. I've been mucking around with color, and have been thinking of shifting to a comic strip format. (partly due to that resizing issue) I'll likely be drawing the backgrounds in more detail and plugging them into the panels like Jeph Jacques does with Questionable Content. That would give me more consistency and the ability to maintain a regular update schedule.

Color versions of the characters would likely look a bit like this...