So this conversation happened today. It pre-empted what was going to be the comic.
Also, I’m experimenting with portrayals of instant messenger conversations. What do you guys think? Is it clear?
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June 7th, 2010
245 – That Didn’t Help
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It is not really clear. two points: 1.) It would help more if you make the IM client preface each comment with a user handle/name. That way you wouldn’t need to resort to various colored boxes. 2.) Not clear if Julian was in the same room as Penny or if he suddenly came in on his own out of the blue as a new conversation.
Sorry for the long post. I enjoy the comic, BTW!
Based on comics 130, 132, 138, 155, 156, and 191, I’d say Penny’s boxes should be green.
Maybe putting in an tiny avatar next to the conversation box would help make it just a teeny bit easier to follow
The text could be a little bigger
I had not real problem with this one. I understood it quite well. But then again this is sort of what happens at work almost every day. The ball gets passed around here so many times the stitching has wore off.
I didn’t think it was too hard to follow, but the combination of location of the boxes and their color took a moment to figure out. One comic that used IM for much of its dialog (at least in the early days) was Near and Far (nearandfarcomic.com), but its format is quite different from yours.
a little small but I like it! I could follow it pretty well, but it sounds like conversations I have on a daily basis so maybe I’m biased.
Rectangular speech bubbles are for IMs, rounded-off ones are for speech. Easy enough to follow.
I think you could make Penny’s words darker. That might help.
Is there something wrong with me? It never occurred to me that it could be anything OTHER than IM. Perhaps Renold has it right … rectangular speak bubbles are obviously IM.
It does sound like a conversation that could happen where I work, too.
It would probably help if the color of the bubble matched an aspect of the character. Frex: Penny’s bubble could be either the same color as her shirt/eyes with a slightly darker border, or it could be the color of her hair with the border being the color of her bangs. Just repeat with the other bubbles.
BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
That looks so much like some of the IMs I used to get, now I just wing it, if I’m wrong, well hey, it was free help anyway.
So what was the comicpress question you all had? Maybe one of us might know the answer.
The IM boxes look too much like typical captions. If you hung a lantern on Penny’s with some kind of techy-looking callout arrow to her laptop, and put a border around the boxes that suggests data — 1’s and 0’s, maybe, or skinny dots and square dots to suggest them — it’d drive home the idea that those aren’t just speech captions, they’re data messages between computers. I’ll email you a .psd file with one I just made. Feel free to use it or play with it or whatever. (I made it in GIMP, if you’d rather have .xcf, let me know.)