Comic Genesis Forums

RPin wrote:Okay, peoples, I made a little preliminary version.

Could you please tell me how it looks on different browsers?

Linky

Forgive the geocities thing... yeah...

As I said before... you have a great start, and I'm glad you took care of that issue with the shape of the star.

Also, as a few other people have said, use .gifs instead of jpegs, since your images don't have a ton of gradients or colors in them. A good rule of thumb is:

Cel-style coloring OR less than 3 colors: Use gif compression.

Photo-style shading OR cel-style coloring and shading with lots of colors: Use jpeg.

Now onto other, more subjective stuff...

Table borders are largely archaic-looking nowadays, and I don't think it's really ever a good idea to use them in something that isn't an extremely quick-and-dirty page. You'll notice on my comic's site that, while I have used tables (enough that it's going to be a logistical nightmare if I ever decide to make the site full CSS rather than partial CSS), and the big table that contains all the content has a border, it's a manually-made border.

Since the Keenspot site uses single-pixel wide borders, and it looks nice, I'd suggest that. There's a couple of different ways to go about doing it, but with a regular table, the easiest is probably to just make a big table containing other data that has 3 columns and 3 rows; 9 cells in all. Put all your content in the middle cell, set the top, bottom, left, right, and corner cells to have black backgrounds (you can do this with either bgcolor or CSS... either way is equally easy). This is a little more complicated than just using a table border, but it looks more professional.

If you want to make the border more complex than a single color, and give it a "frame" look like the one on my comic's site has, you'll have to make images and have them repeat in the background. Depending on the complexity of the border, you will need separate images for the top, bottom, left, right, and all the corners. If you're going to do this, do it with CSS instead of cell attributes, because the attribute that sets a repeating image for the background of a cell is not supported by HTML 4.0 and has a habit of not functioning properly or at all in some browsers. Anyway, I don't recommend this for your design.

The non-graphical text in the descriptive section and that black "The Guide!" section of your design is too flush with the cell borders. It shouldn't be up against them like that. The easiest (or at least, the most reliable) way to take care of this is to make a table to act as an invisible border or "cusion" around your text, sort of like cell padding and cell spacing but easier to control once you have it in there, especially if you use weird text settings like justified alignment (IMO). You'll want separate cells for each side you want to cusion from the border. In each cell, put a tiny, transparent .gif with its dimensions adjusted to provide the necessary cusioning (for instance, if you want the spaces between the left and the right of the text and the coorresponding sides of the edges you're cusioning them from to be 10 pixels wide, adjust the .gif so it's 10 pixels wide. You can make a single, 1-pixel transparent .gif for this and adjust the height and width attributes of the image in the HTML, so you don't really need more than one spacer image (though it might help you organize things in your head to have more than one, I don't know)).

The newsbox, like the big table containing the rest of the content, would also look better with something other than a generic table border.

The "Keenspot entertainment" little box ad thing looks WAY out of place in the design. The only suggestion I can really give is to do something with it so that it doesn't have the appearence of just floating in some vague location. It looks like you just put it there because you couldn't figure out where else to put it. Also, does it HAVE to be green? Who says it can't be red to match the rest of the 'space color scheme? Same goes for the accompanying copyright text. It looks out of place. You should probably figure out some other place to put it. Same goes for the banners, although in that case, I was going to suggest removing them entirely. After all, why would anyone need to link to keenspace using a keenspace banner?? This was a question I considered early on when I was sketching designs (for my presently vapourware design!) in my sketchbook, and since I couldn't come up with a sensible answer, I removed banners from consideration.

My last two suggestions have nothing to do with usability and design cleanliness, and are really absolutely subjective: First, have you tried out different sizes for the link text (join, login, forum, and help)? I think they look a little too big. Also, have you tried moving them vertically? I'd suggest placing them so the bottoms of the letters with tails (j, g, and p) contact with the white of the cell below them, with no border at all. Either that, or move them so the words look more vertically centered. Finally, I think you should change "space news" to "news space," because the similar news section on Keenspot is labelled "news spot."

Oh, and right now, your background looks to be just a generic HTML grey. Might want to change that.


I also have a question for Kisai that's also kind of a suggestion for everyone: Is there some reason why the main page and the guide page can't be more closely tied to each other? I was thinking it would be neat to have a "general" version of the guide on www, and have a more specific, expanded version on guide (meaning, I don't see why we can't have a section on the www front page with the heading, "sort comics by..." and then have links for title, genre, frequency, etc that go to the respective sort methods on guide, but without any of the specific sublinks, like A, B, C under title or the genre sublinks... at the bottom of the list, you could have a link to go to the guide front page... the best analogy I can come up with for this is Google: There's the basic query box, but you have the option of clicking a link to do a more "advanced" search). Maybe I'm just nuts, but I think that would be an added usability bonus. In RPin's specific case, that black section you have that says "The Guide!" looks nice, but it wastes a lot of space and I think something like this would use that space more effectively.


I realize it's a tad arrogant of me to have as much to say about other people's designs and designs in general without having my own up yet, but I doubt mine's going to be anywhere near as creative as RPin's (probably going to just look like a repurposing of the 'Spot design scheme, where the most work done by me will be in the design/setup of internal content, rather than the design as a whole).

I'm taking care of some of the alterations you recommended, but...

fi13r wrote:
Also, as a few other people have said, use .gifs instead of jpegs, since your images don't have a ton of gradients or colors in them.

I'm not sure if you were talking to me, but you most certainly wont find any jpgs on my html.

fi13r wrote:Table borders are largely archaic-looking nowadays, and I don't think it's really ever a good idea to use them in something that isn't an extremely quick-and-dirty page. You'll notice on my comic's site that, while I have used tables (enough that it's going to be a logistical nightmare if I ever decide to make the site full CSS rather than partial CSS), and the big table that contains all the content has a border, it's a manually-made border.

Since the Keenspot site uses single-pixel wide borders, and it looks nice, I'd suggest that. There's a couple of different ways to go about doing it, but with a regular table, the easiest is probably to just make a big table containing other data that has 3 columns and 3 rows; 9 cells in all. Put all your content in the middle cell, set the top, bottom, left, right, and corner cells to have black backgrounds (you can do this with either bgcolor or CSS... either way is equally easy). This is a little more complicated than just using a table border, but it looks more professional.

If you want to make the border more complex than a single color, and give it a "frame" look like the one on my comic's site has, you'll have to make images and have them repeat in the background. Depending on the complexity of the border, you will need separate images for the top, bottom, left, right, and all the corners. If you're going to do this, do it with CSS instead of cell attributes, because the attribute that sets a repeating image for the background of a cell is not supported by HTML 4.0 and has a habit of not functioning properly or at all in some browsers. Anyway, I don't recommend this for your design.

Or you can just place style="border:1px solid black" on the table tag. I just figured it out looking at the KSpot source code.

fi13r wrote:Also, does it HAVE to be green? Who says it can't be red to match the rest of the 'space color scheme? Same goes for the accompanying copyright text. It looks out of place. You should probably figure out some other place to put it.

What's the problem with the green? I think it adds a nice contrast. You must be right about the banners, though.

fi13r wrote:I realize it's a tad arrogant of me to have as much to say about other people's designs and designs in general without having my own up yet, but I doubt mine's going to be anywhere near as creative as RPin's (probably going to just look like a repurposing of the 'Spot design scheme, where the most work done by me will be in the design/setup of internal content, rather than the design as a whole).

Don't worry. You're being nothing than honest and high-spirited. I thank you for that. I too can't wait to see what you may come up with.

Phalanx wrote:

RPin wrote:Ghastly might complain because his comic is updated weekly, I guess.

Nah, I have more faith in Ghastly than that.

If you're talking about having comics only put on the portal for the day they update then comics who update 7 days a week will dominate the portal. There'd be no point in comics that only update once a week even bothering to be part of the portal since they'll only benefit for one day reguarless of their merits while other people dominate it the for 7 days.

If you're talking about having the updates to the portal take place based on the daily stats, so each day the portal is updated, that's fine. All comics will have their highest stats on the days when they update anyways.

Considering that some genres tend to lend themselves only to weekly updates someone could sweep the the portal simply by updating shit on every day of the week, since most comics that update once a week do so on Sunday, they'd be able to rule the portal every day but one.

Fricken double posts. Something is fucking up with the forums it seems.

RPin wrote:I'm not sure if you were talking to me, but you most certainly wont find any jpgs on my html.

Hmm... then it looks like there might be a problem with the compression you're using on some of the .gifs (look specifically at the big star in the header graphic... it looks like there's something wrong with the antialiasing on and near some of the diagonals).

RPin wrote:Or you can just place style="border:1px solid black" on the table tag. I just figured it out looking at the KSpot source code.

Ah.

Actually, I knew there was such a thing as that. I just forgot. My bad.

RPin wrote:What's the problem with the green? I think it adds a nice contrast.

It would if there were either more of it, or if it were distributed more logically in the overall design.

As it stands now, you have it all concentrated in one place. There's no specific relationship between it and the rest of the site other than, "Well, it's the Keenspot color, and I have to have the Keenspot logo on here somewhere, so here it is."

What I'm planning on doing is making a variant of the Keenspot "spotlight" style logo that Chris was talking about earlier, but adapting it to match the 'Space color. Still not 100% sure of where I'm going to put it, though it's probably going to be at the very bottom.

If I can come up with a way to integrate the green into the site, I probably will, but at this time I can't figure out a way to do that so it doesn't look like I've just added the color in there for the sake of contrast alone.

Ghastly wrote:If you're talking about having the updates to the portal take place based on the daily stats, so each day the portal is updated, that's fine. All comics will have their highest stats on the days when they update anyways.

The problem with that model is that then the people who first work their way to the top stay on the top and ALWAYS have an edge over other comics. It's one of the main problems with a lot of toplists have: the sites that get to the top first stay there, and it's difficult for other cartoons to supercede them.

Surely there must be some kind of middle-ground?

Well I guess if we're to make everyone happy we'll have to have one portal for people up update on monday, one portal for people who update on tuesday, one portal for people who update on wednesday, one portal for people who update one thursday, one portal for people who update on friday, one portal for people who update on saturday, one portal for people who update one sunday, one portal for people who update mon/wed/fri, one portal for people who update tue/thur/sat and one portal for people who update five days a week, and one portal for people who update seven days a week. That will make for a pretty crowded front page but I guess it will make everyone happy. Perhaps one portal based solely on traffic too.

If you go with the model based only on the days you update then in order for the portal to be of any use to comics that update only once a week, they'll have to delete their old comics each day and update it with another copy of their comic that day as well. That's a big pain in the ass just to stay on the portal when some guy can post shit seven days a week and knock you off the portal for six of them.

I'd rather see a portal based on the merits of traffic than simply based on the quantity of comics uploaded during a week.

Instead of all those portals being created to keep it fair to everyone then make the portal with 10 entries for each genre. The first five entries are based on traffic, the next five are ones drawn from random from the list. If what you're worried about is people who arn't popular enough to merit a spot on the portal never getting a chance to be on it, this would make solution to allow them the exposure while still rewarding the top Keenspace comics for their efforts.

Ghastly wrote:If you're talking about having the updates to the portal take place based on the daily stats, so each day the portal is updated, that's fine. All comics will have their highest stats on the days when they update anyways.

The problem with that model is that then the people who first work their way to the top stay on the top and ALWAYS have an edge over other comics. It's one of the main problems with a lot of toplists have: the sites that get to the top first stay there, and it's difficult for other cartoons to supercede them.

Surely there must be some kind of middle-ground?

Ha Ha! You got hit by the double post too!

Neener neener neener!

Keenspace ought to have a Google-style design: Just one big ol' SEARCH button.

fi13r wrote:Hmm... then it looks like there might be a problem with the compression you're using on some of the .gifs (look specifically at the big star in the header graphic... it looks like there's something wrong with the antialiasing on and near some of the diagonals).

Really? I don't see what you're talking about. Could you show me a print screen, please?

fi13r wrote:It would if there were either more of it, or if it were distributed more logically in the overall design.

As it stands now, you have it all concentrated in one place. There's no specific relationship between it and the rest of the site other than, "Well, it's the Keenspot color, and I have to have the Keenspot logo on here somewhere, so here it is."

What I'm planning on doing is making a variant of the Keenspot "spotlight" style logo that Chris was talking about earlier, but adapting it to match the 'Space color. Still not 100% sure of where I'm going to put it, though it's probably going to be at the very bottom.

If I can come up with a way to integrate the green into the site, I probably will, but at this time I can't figure out a way to do that so it doesn't look like I've just added the color in there for the sake of contrast alone.

Design is always subjective, you know. What I may think it's good is probably what you think it's bad.

My main problem is, I don't know what kind of information to put. My page seems plain, and everything seems out of place because they are out of place. Ghastly's idea of a portal is very good, and may help me, but we really need to hear from Kisai or someone else about the possibility of this.

I think a new voting system would benefit both new and popular comics, and would drive more traffic to the kspace homepage.

I believe the only people who visit the page now are looking for login or registering.

Faub said something about a new guide that allowed people to vote on their favorite comics. That could be implemented on the page, I guess.

The problem with a voting system is it compromises the design of our websites because then we would have to include a link to the voting page if we wanted to be in the portal. You will also run into the problem that toplists sites always have in that certain types of comics tend to draw the more fanatical... er... devoted readerships (furries and manga/anime comics) where a small number of readers will make it their business to vote every day, possibly multiple times a day, to push their favorite comic up the list. Other types of comics with higher readerships but not drawn in a style that attracts those personality types will end up not making it onto the list simply because they don't have the "fanboy" type of readers. I think stats is the way to go.

Everyone is going to be on the portal on the "more" page. Those who draw the traffic are rewarded with a top five listing. The one thing keenspace does not do at all right now is reward its top draw comics. This is why so many of them in the past have left to become independent. A system that rewards its top comics is good for all of keenspace. The top comics bring the readers to Keenspace, once here they explore the other comics.

I think five spots to the top comics and then five randomly drawn spots would work best to reward Keenspace's top comics and allow those who are not yet on top a chance to be featured off of the more page.

Hmm, lessee...

About Pin's design:
It's good, but it's campy (I don't know if it's good or bad). Stars remind me of 70ies, actually, something like "kiss".
But please, do not put star background! There's already enough stars as it is.
Well, basically, I think you should tone it down a bit, you know, if you're using that logo, use it on fewer places, or make it a bit, well, less flashy. It's not animated, but still, when I look at it, it seems like if it's moving.
Also, I prefere green to ged. Using green might be a clue to related-not related to keenspace design.
There I am, sitting on my arse, saying "Do this do that" while other people are actually doing something. It's good to suck at design.

About the content of the main page:

I suggest this sort of listing:
Well, you have sections by genres:
Action
Adventure
etc...

And link to one comic of each category is displayed on main page.
There would be no more than fifteen links on main page, still, every comic would be covered.
And each day (or yet better, each time site is loaded) links change.

Now, I reccomend, besides genres, these categories being included:

Top 25 comic - listing one of top 25 comics each time
Last updated comic at the moment
Lazy ass comics - listing those comics that stopped updating after 10 strips or update every couple of months. Now, it would be a mock having these on main page, still it seems good idea to me, that those comics are transfered from one of other categories to this category as soon as it's been a few weeks since their last update.

There.

Ghastly wrote:If you're talking about having the updates to the portal take place based on the daily stats, so each day the portal is updated, that's fine. All comics will have their highest stats on the days when they update anyways.

What I meant was that you sort of cycle the space, so comics that update frequently and draw a decent audienc at the same time get more of a payoff (it's only fair, since they put more work into it).

So the criteria would be 'updated today' AND 'page load %' and not just one or the other. It's still more likely to get a varied and still reliable selection that just by page load.

Considering that some genres tend to lend themselves only to weekly updates someone could sweep the the portal simply by updating shit on every day of the week, since most comics that update once a week do so on Sunday, they'd be able to rule the portal every day but one.

Damn. That is a valid point though. A comic that updates only once a week (and draws a decent audience through that one update a week) could cheat by putting up the fillers for every day for the rest of the week.

I highly doubt any comic that posts 'shit' every day is likely to get a page load high enough to rank in the top range, or at least, enough to get in the genre spots regardless of how frequently they posted anyway.

But then again, for every ranking system there is, there will be people who will find ways to exploit it. We could have some sort of 'abuse' system if that was the case.

I don't like having a voting system for obvious reasons. They're easily exploited, they require the author to harass their readers into voting and most of the time they're highly inaccurate.

Ghastly wrote:I think five spots to the top comics and then five randomly drawn spots would work best to reward Keenspace's top comics and allow those who are not yet on top a chance to be featured off of the more page.

Hmm... good idea. When you think about it, you could have the static top ten(or 25) comics, regardless of genre, then below you could have the different genres (5 each), ranked according to page load popularity and update frequency. I suppose you could exclude those already in the top ten if you wanted to be fair to the poor underdogs.

The top ten comics would probably rarely change, but the genre listing would be dynamic, so you get a better spread of comics that way.

Regarding genres: Mystery! You forgot mystery comics!

Phalanx wrote:

Ghastly wrote:I think five spots to the top comics and then five randomly drawn spots would work best to reward Keenspace's top comics and allow those who are not yet on top a chance to be featured off of the more page.

Hmm... good idea. When you think about it, you could have the static top ten(or 25) comics, regardless of genre, then below you could have the different genres (5 each), ranked according to page load popularity and update frequency. I suppose you could exclude those already in the top ten if you wanted to be fair to the poor underdogs.

The top ten comics would probably rarely change, but the genre listing would be dynamic, so you get a better spread of comics that way.

Regarding genres: Mystery! You forgot mystery comics!

I already pointed out that those are very good ideas. In fact, I'd rather have 5 randomly drawn comics of every genre than the whole newsbox thing. That'd mean the recent efforts of Kisai in trying to ressurect the newsbox will be in vain, but frankly speaking, I don't think there would be many artists willing to place the newsbox code on their page.

I'll try to come up with an alternative design, with this portal-like nature.

There's no reason the voting system would need to be on the site itself. It could be part of the guide. Maybe it's less intuitive but it would still work without you changing your site. Your participation would not be mandatory but you would be part of the list just for being in the guide.

It might be as useful to have a page listing various voting sites and events already in existence. Basically, make a script that allows keenspace members to log in and add a voting site, an event, a dropdown or a contest to the list. The list is displayed like the guide with portals for the different types. Duplicate sites are ignored and people who post "bad" links can have their ability to add links revoked by the admins.

Basically, it would be something more official than the forums and would group together tons of related sites.

I think it would be interesting at least.

You know, I'm actually very curious of what Filer may have in mind.

Because there's just so few of the KeenSpot's elements that can be used on a KSpace page...

RPin wrote:I don't think there would be many artists willing to place the newsbox code on their page.

I would have to restructure my site but I would probably do it. (I still need to make a drawing for it, though.)