I guess this could be considered a technique maybe...
For a few strips now I've been experimenting with rollover dialogue balloons, where the strip is initially shown with all dialogue removed and the reader has to roll their mouse over to see the words and such. I started doing this because I was curious to see if the strips made sense visually and after I removed all the speech bubbles I thought it might be interesting to just post it to the site like that. So far people have said it's good because they can get look at the full 'artwork' and also that they get to conjure up their own interpretations of whats going on through the characters expressions and frame compositions. Someone else also said it was slightly annoying.
I'm just kind of wondering what other artists thoughts on this kind of thing are.
The current page is kind of testing out some of the extremes you could use with this sort of thing.
It's a cool idea, but I'm often multitasking on the computer. One screen has my mail and messengers, half of the other is one browser, the other section is the other. So, while I chat and do code for work, I like to cruise through comic archives. Having to keep my mouse over yours to see the words just doesn't work with that kind of thing. I'd rethink it... maybe have special stuff come up when you roll over like comments. I wouldn't keep anything majorly important like text in the rollover only form though.
(also, it did mess up for me a few times too and i had to dump my cache and reload ...which was frustrating)
Yeah, it's a neat idea, but seems like unnecessary effort to read a comic. I wouldn't want to deal with it. Especially when there's load time involved for bringing up the balloons.
Mercury Hat wrote:If you wanted to show off the art, why not flip it so that the image with the dialogue is the default, then if you mouseover you can see it without?
Yeah... what they said!!! lol
Why don't i ever get to think up the good ideas? murr....
Mercury Hat wrote:If you wanted to show off the art, why not flip it so that the image with the dialogue is the default, then if you mouseover you can see it without?
This is a great yet worryingly obvious suggestion, but to be honest I don't think my artwork deserves that sort of directed attention, yet. The way it is now is more for working out compositions that flow nicely and logically without the dialogue to guide it rather than to look at the art. If the dialogue is shown first the reader will know exactly which way to interpret things when seeing the non-dialogue version.
But so far the overall consensus is pointing towards unnecessary annoyance...which is very helpful to know.
I think this a brilliant idea. Sometimes its difficult to try and work word balloons around the images and keep everything from looking cluttered- this cleans things up handily. It also helps emphasize the story told by the images themselves- I think there was another thread here where some people were complaining that readers tend to gloss over the images and mostly read the text.
I think the problems are mostly technical- this definitely deserves further exploration.
I never knew you had a webcomic, Greg. You kept that one quiet...
Looking over your archives, I found the rollover text a touch annoying. Sometimes it came up, sometimes it didn't. One time it appeared after a while, cos it seemed like the text loaded after the image.
It could work, though possibly aiming for permanently visible, with slightly transparent background, so you can see through to the art, with a button to turn text off or on. It is nice to be able to see the full image, but your average reader will leave if it annoys him.
