Today, I mosied on to campus with a 298 page production book in my hands (lots of jaws dropped). I got my signatures; I am finished with grad school. The purpose of this blog was to document my process for the "project journal" section of the produciton book. That's no longer necessary, so either this blog will go away, or it will accompany BetaBits as a sketch journal of sorts. I guess in the meantime I'll let it sit here awkwardly.

Ok, I'm going to elaborate more on that last entry. First, I'm going to begin by confessing that I was unaware that I had the appropriate project handbook beside my desk all this time. I was under the mistaken impression that there was a new one issued for this semester (I can understand where that train of thought came from, I just wish I had actually checked the manual before last week). As a result, I did not know what my actual deadlines were (having fallen away from my self-imposed ones). The good news is that I realized my faulty assumption more or less in time. The bad news is that there is still a lot for me to cover over the next week.

In terms of implementing my site design, I had gotten caught up in learning CSS that I had forgotten how handy tables can be. When I finally came around to using tables (something about consistently nesting divs so that I could get things to align right and yet still expand if needed did not feel solid to me), I found myself fighting CSS too. I was fighting Dreamweaver the most, when I should have been of working with it and then tweaking the code as needed. Somehow I came to my senses and began to work with Dreamweaver, and implementing tables and CSS together. I had something that felt solid, and I had a stylesheet that I could use with different-looking pages (since the bulk of their layouts were now handled by tables and not absolutely positioned css divs). That helped me feel ready to upload to my host.

Then came the host-purchasing. I spent all of Friday reading over hosting plans and terms of service trying to choose the best one. The plan I had outlined in my proposal was going to be too small to hold both my comic and my portfolio site (since I want to keep them together in one account). Moving up to a bigger plan with that service (A Small Orange) was no longer a good option, either: their own website and those of my friend who'd recommended them to me were running glacially slow. I contacted that friend who told me that the speed issue was substantial enough that he was in the process of moving to a new host. So, then came the day of reading plans until my head spun, and then some more. In the end, I wound up going with Bluehost, which another friend of mine had suggested a while back and which was my original alternate to A Small Orange. At least I know I contemplated this thoroughly.

I installed the management script, Comikaze on my new account, uploaded my files, and things just worked. It was amazing. Naturally, there were a few small tweaks and bumps, but it's up there and I'm pretty much awed by that fact. I inputted the new domain name server information for the betabits.net name earlier today in order to expedite the switch. Then I called a real human being at Yahoo! to make sure I entered the information correctly. Not only had I done that, but he could already see my site at betabits.net (he described it to me and everything--he said it looks nice; i was thrilled). The change has yet to propogate to my corner of the Web, but hopefully it will soon, so I can get people checking it out and filling out my survey. Phew. So much more to do, yet I feel so done already!

The comic's site is up, and it is working. The amount of relief I feel right now is immense. However, I still have a lot more to do, particularly in the production-book area. But wow, I officially for-real have a webcomic. Hurrah!

Well, I would like to rescind the freakout in my last entry, as I just discovered that the seemingly major problem is not so major at all...and, in fact, isn't really a problem, just one of those things that happen when all your pieces aren't in place yet. Phew!

Gyahhh!!!! Ahem. Putting together the website layout is proving way more difficult than I thought. Or, just as I thought I had worked out a set of kinks and (most) everything was going smoothly, I asked a friend with a PC to check it out on his computer. The screenshots from both IE and FFX are scream-worthy. Ok, not the screen-shots themselves, but the fact that my attempts to fix the problems apparently have had NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER. Even more frustrating is the fact that I don't have access to a PC myself. I hate relying on friends sending me screenshots from the west coast to see what's going on, but I currently have no other option. Oy.

I took a nap this afternoon, and dreamed of resizing handles. I completely revamped my website design to something I like much better than the original. It turns out that this new layout accomodates a more horizontally-oriented strip as opposed to the vertical ones I was coming out with. So I went back and re-arranged my strips. While that may seem backwards and silly, the fact is that I wasn't entirely convinced that a vertical strip was working well. I was having trouble aranging elements in their panels without getting claustrophobic about the apparent low ceiling. I was having trouble previewing the strips in Flash because they were just too darned long (and you can't exactly scroll down in a Flash preview, or so it seems). Another result of the strips being too long is that they would require scrolling on the viewer's part, which in some way would break up the reading process. While the effect was small, it was distracting enough to me while I was testing it in a browser (even with my hand on my trusty scroll mouse, which is merely an extra limb to me, I noticed the difference.) I remember when Scott McCloud visited Northeastern, he discussed how scrolling + refresh rates = an abrasive reading experience--I think the sound effect he made was "Pap! Pap! Pap!" That may have something to do with it. Also, with vertically arranged panels, one has to break the reading line many more times than with a horizontal arrangement (something else McCloud mentioned in his books), and--as much as I hate to admit it--it is somehow distracting. It's like my perceived whole of the strip would get broken down into blocks that I could piece together logically, but not fluidly. I also found that my original took up a lot of pixel acreage as well... It didn't seem like a huge problem (aside from it exacerbating that whole scrolling issue) at first, but when I saw one of my strips in the context of this new site layout, I saw that the big pictures were somehow cumbersome. So I've gone and dealt with that while re-orienting my strips (which worked out just fine, since I had to shrink down the panels to keep the strips within an 800px minimum. Heck, if I'm lucky (or anal-retentive enough) I just might come up with a site that one doesn't really need to scroll through while trucking through the archives (it's a pet peeve of mine--I hate looking for the "next" button because my mouse isn't sitting on top of it from page to page).

I'm back at the Wellstyled.com color scheme generator seeking something less retina-searing than what I have right now. They have a little pull-down menu to show how the color scheme looks to people with various color-perception disorders. For the most part, the results of each disorder is a dulled-down version of the original. I suddenly find myself wondering if I have one of these disorders, which means what I'm producing isn't just bright, it's insanely bright. I start thinking back to eye-doctor visits, to try and remember if they do any color-perception tests. I start to think that I'm screwed if I want to design things!

...of course this train of thought is ridiculous.

A few quick lessons I've learned while constructing my comic in Flash:

• The grid is your friend. Turn it on, and adjust it as needed.


• Leave conversation bubbles until the very end, when you're sure of how you'll lay things out. Otherwise, you'll be doing them over and over again, which is a waste of time and energy.


• Movie clips can be nested inside of graphics and still work ok.


• Groups and drawing objects will save your life. They prevent painted items from melding together unintentionally, and they allow you to order things on a z-axis without relying on a million layers.


• It doesn't really help to make your drawings super-big to begin with. Starting with almost the right size saves you from resizing later, and from frustrating jaggies from a bitmap nested in a resized graphic symbol.


• Flash does appear to get tired once in a while, preventing you from using keyboard commands. Give it a short (10 second) break when this happens.

Also, sometimes creating the work seems more fun than the final product, as evidenced by this screen capture:

I've "discovered" some wonderful things about flash. The first is object drawing, which converts the things you paint into objects automatically. This has helped greatly in terms of me having to dissect paint strokes later on, as now they'll only combine if I purposefully break them down in order to allow them to do so. after which, i'll usually make them into groups again. I never much used groups, but now i'm finding them to be wonderful. Now that i have these discrete items, i can arange them on a z-axis without dealing with such a ridiculous number of layers. I looked back on my first episode to extract a pair of goggles I had drawn in there, and was amazed by how complex I had made it. It's nice to see that I've been simplifying.

I've gone on to learn quite a bit about CSS (before, I could kind of change some colors, etc. in pre-written code, but I had no real idea of what I was working with). With the possible exception of the navigation bar, it looks like my site will be more or less entirely layed out with CSS. This is fantastic, as I generally hate tables. However, I think studying CSS and PHP on top of each other like that is getting me a little muddled in sorting out the two. Hopefully, I'll get it together when I'm all done with the site design.

I've decided to use the Comikaze comic manager. It will make my life 8 million times easier. I won't be able to do everything exactly as I wanted to, but I'll be a lot better off. One day I can tinker with the manager itself, I guess, but that day will be a long time coming.

Using shirt cardboard and extra gaffing tape, I've constructed a "hat" for my computer, which blocks the sun from getting in my eyes and glaring all over the computer while letting my little cacti get sunlight. My only other alternative is to close the shade, but that's a bummer, especially for the cacti.

I've been completely Red Bull-free this semester. Also, I dripped some coffee or cocoa on the new carpet, so I'm not allowed to have any in my room anymore. Not having caffeine at my hand has made working a bit more difficult. However, today I had no caffeine whatsoever, and I've been more productive than usual. Go figure.

OK, I've hit one of those points Brooke warned us about. First off, yesterday was a complete waste and a total bummer. It was a day of snow-shoveling...finally I got down to drawing some last night, but I could already tell something wasn't working right. Plum's eyes were too big or something...and now that I've put Q into that picture, I totally hate it. I was trying to thicken things up a bit, because I feel like the characters in my first episode look too wirey...the whole thing looks cluttered (which is partially on purpose, due to the messy workbench area in the background), and it takes more memory than I'd like. Looking at the other comics I like, they tend to take up less space than I do, yet look infinitely better...just straight up more pleasing to the eye. I have to find a fix to this, but I'm afraid I'm also just letting myself get lost in more minor details rather than moving on. Generally, I'm feeling like a waste.

I'll be honest. I'm loving this learning about PHP stuff. It's actually a programming language--who knew? It reminds me of when I took a class in C when I was a freshman in undergrad. I feel like once I have this under my belt I'll really be able to do things.

i mean really. This is too much fun. And I've been forgetting to track the amount of time I've been spending on the project. Figuring it out won't be fun...but I should do that sooner rather than later.

The images i'm putting out are ridiculous enough to make me giggle as I make them. Hopefully this is a good sign. I am behind schedule, but have found that I left myself an open week in my production schedule: catch-up time! Also, tonight my mom finally got how worried I am about this and is in favor of backing off and letting me get down to work more. Thank goodness.

In reference to what I wrote earlier about the webcomickers who seem too work too much on paper for my tastes, I now see why. I don't know why I chose to forget/ignore that most other digital graphics projects I've worked on had required (at least at the start) some sort of reference image that I would draw over in another layer. This image is usually a photograph, or a scanned drawing of mine. However, after a while, I do seem to get the hang of things and rely less and less on the middle-men who are paper-and-pencil. Hopefully that will be the case as I progress on this project.

Also, Tuesday - Friday this week are crackdown-project retreat days. In other news, I got paid, which means I can buy those very important things I need, like hosting and fonts! I'm so excited. And, I finally started making drawings of Q I can really dig. I think I have a crush on one of those drawings, which means I am doing something right.

Now, this is more like it. I'm not sure at which point Plum's welding mask turned into a pair of driving goggles, but I should definitely do something about that, since the mask is not merely decoration. Here's an early Plum with her first mask (and looking oddly like Lara from Dr. Zhivago):

Here is another attempt. I am happier with the results, and hope that coloring will take away the current "soccer mom" look i think she has.

"Tell me about Sandbenders," Masahiko said, putting the control-face away and buttoning his tunic.

"It started with a woman who was an interface designer," Chia said, glad to change the subject." Her husband was a jeweller, and he'd died of that nerve-attenuation thing, before they saw how to fix it. But he'd been a big green, too, and he hated the way consumer electronics were made, a coule of little chips and boards inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there. . . . And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone. . . . And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brough out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions. . . .

"And it turned out some people liked that, too, liked it a lot. He started getting commissions to make these things. One of the first was for a keyboard, and the keys were cut from the keys of an old piano, with the numbers and letters in silver. But then he got sick. . . .

"So after he was dead, the software designer started thinking about all that, and how she wanted to do something that took what he'd been doing into something else. So she cashed out her stock in all the companies she'd worked for, and she bought some land on the coast, in Oregon--"

And the train pulled into Shinjuku, and everyone stood up, heading for the doors, the businessman closing his breast-bondage comic and tucking it beneath his arm.

--William Gibson, Idoru, 1996

I read this passage over lunch today, and thought that it seemed to fit in very well with sort of issues BetaBits addresses. It's a different approach, likely a better one, but not so much fodder for a humorous comic-strip. It was written over a decade ago, and I don't remember the "point-of-purchase eye-candy" being nearly as big a deal as it is now. Electronic things were either black or silver (if they were stereos), black or black with wood inlay (television sets), or beige (computers). I was a senior in high school when Apple released the Bondi-blue iMac (10.17.1998, according to http://support.apple.com/specs/index_3.html), which seemed to set off a revolution in electronics designed to look like candy. (Amusingly, I remember seeing these iMacs on college campuses during visits and thinking the fish screen-saver was cute. I wonder how many of those were destined to become MacQuaria?) I guess Gibson is a visionary like that. I wonder if a Sandbenders-like project would work nowadays? Would people respond to it as they have done in Idoru, or would they be uninterested in owning non-"disposable" consumer electronics? Would such a project come as needed relief from the pressure to own the latest style in electronics shells?

As far as BetaBits goes, I'm still trying to decide on a style. While I love the art in Questionable Content, I don't think I want mine to be nearly as realistic. Lately, I've been reading a lot of Astérix, and, being a longtime fan of the artwork, am trying to figure out why I like it so much, and perhaps how I can emulate and adapt that style to my own work. Two things stand out to me. One is that the people are based more on general geometric shapes, and not so much on skeletal structures (or stick-figures, what-have-you). The other is that the people are generally "short." Their heads are much too large for their bodies, but it works out well nonetheless (likely due to my first observation). This contradicts what I learned from a book I got in high-school about drawing Marvel characters, which makes sense since that book was dedicated to creating the large, tall, muscular powerhouses that are American Superheroes. According to that book (if I remember it right), heads are supposed to be only 1/8 or 1/9 the total body height, otherwise the figure may look too "wimpy." Uderzo's "tallest" figures are only about 5 times the height of their heads, which probably lends a humorous sensibility to the comics. With that in mind, I made up this quick sketch of Plum:
Sure, it's not nearly as elegant as an earlier iteration of Plum (above), but it might work out better. Either way, I have to keep at sketching until I find what I really want--and soon. Q is even more difficult. I had a hard time drawing boys when I was young, and apparently the problem persists. I'll get there, though.

Speaking of Astérix, I finally made the following pressing and necessary modifications to my map of Boston:

I finished reading the Barron's Webcomic book, and am surprised by how "print-minded" a lot of these webcomic artists seem to be. Most of them do a lot of work on paper, then scan it in at a high resolution (for printing in the future), then finish it up and shrink it down for the web. A lot of them seem to do webcomics because it's their only outlet "for now." For some reason, it bothers me...probably because I'm excited about webcomics as webcomics, and these people seem to see it as a medium of convenience. John Allison seems to favor computers all the way (even though he does publish books of his comics, which I think is just fine, since they are done after the fact, and I'll admit it's nice to have a physical volume)--that makes me happy since he's one of my favorites.