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.