Moonbase

I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking about navigation and layout for webcomics lately. I think I will have some concrete thoughts of my own to offer in a little while, but for now, I’d just like to put up some links that I have found particularly helpful or at least thought-provoking on the topic.

• Von and Moggy – a question about scrolling – very interesting discussion
• Joel Fagin’s Comic Website Design Tutorial – a pretty solid tutorial on structuring a webcomic site
• I Can’t Stop Thinking! #3 – well, I had to list this one
• Manmachine [mild nudity] – an example of Javascript-driven assisted scrolling; falls down a bit in that the page is too tall for my browser
• Axe Cop – another assisted scrolling example; Flash-based this time. Makes me seasick.
• attention people who write webcomics – if your readers have to keep moving the mouse to get to the next page, you lose
• I’d like to make webcomics larger without scrolling all over the page – readers do know how to scroll — they just really hate it, as evidenced by this filed Firefox issue
• Bug 486918 – Awful image quality in downscaling – Although IE 8, Chrome, Opera, etc. use fairly decent downscaling filters by default, Firefox is still doing nearest-neighbor downscaling (ugh); Lanczos may eventually be an option, but not until after Gecko 1.9.2
• the image-rendering CSS property in Mozilla – the newest Firefox will soon give us bilinear, at least…

My preliminary thoughts:

1. Readers hate scrolling; the comic should fit the browser window.
2. If you must make the reader scroll, limit scrolling to one axis.
3. Of the two axes, scrolling vertically is better since we have convenient UI like the mouse wheel for doing it.
4. If the browser window is too small, downscaling can help, but good-quality image resampling is still somewhat hard to come by in the browser.
5. Even with good-quality resampling, downscaling is still useless below a certain size, since important features will become illegible.
6. When downscaling isn’t an option, it is probably best to chop the page into smaller units which can be shown individually when the browser window is too small to show them all at once.

Unfortunately there seems to be a big gap between these points and actual webcomic practice.

In a future post I think I’ll have more to say about why scrolling is really bad for comics, at least ones which weren’t carefully designed specifically for an “infinite canvas” presentation. (And even then…)