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).