Dumbing of Age is now 1000px across instead of the lame old 900px. I had to widen the site to make some changes, and then the strip looked small. So I made big.
Well, TODAY’s is 1000px and the one I uploaded for a few weeks from now is 1000px. I should get around to fixing the others.
Anyway.
Enjoy.
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Sounds like it’s gonna be LARGE.
Yes! So very large.
Thank you for that, to you a thousand internets.
I like it Walky. Makes it much easier to read.
Wish Sabrina Online would do the same, but with Eric’s style and font choices it would take away from the atmosphere of the comic.
Besides, that’s what ‘magnify’ is for-when I can find it on Vista anyway.
I was wonder why the site look different.
Hi David, as I’m sure you’re concerned with bandwidth issues as your images get larger, here’s a friendly tip.
While I found it super sexy the day I noticed Joyce cut out using alpha-transparency PNG:s (yes, I am that kind of nerd), you don’t always need to use that. When the only cutouts are rectangular panels (such as in today’s strip), good old GIF-type transparency will work just as well. And with your graphic style, 256 colours are often plenty.
I tested today’s strip, and when reducing it to 128 colour PNG with transparency it shrank from 273 kB to 65 kB.
I have no idea what any of that means, but it sounds impressive none-the-less!
(Can I get a Universal Translator over here!?)
Björn Translation: PNG (a type of picture file) uses a lot more bandwidth than GIF (another type of picture file) does.
Björn believes that Willis is better off using GIF instead of PNG since his art style and colour scheme can look just as good in GIF while using less bandwidth.
Yes, sometimes, although on some strips a full-featured PNG is warranted.
I’m not suggesting Willis use GIF:s, though. It is possible to “dumb down” a PNG to roughly the same technical standard as GIF, and thereby achieve less bandwidth. Win-win!
Tried it, didn’t work! See, when I upload a file, the site automatically makes three others. One for the RSS feed, one for the archives, and one for thumbnails.
Anyway, when the site automatically resizes the 1000px original for, say, the RSS feed, it results in this terrible monster of a mangled file.
So they’ll have to all be saved largely.
Good job! Bigger is better. After all the complaining in the 80s about comics being printed smaller and smaller in the newspapers, I often wonder why webcomics creators — as well as those who post newspaper comics on the web — seem not to maximize the space available to them. (I have a shitty app on my MyYahoo page that still posts newspaper strips from GoComics at the size of postage stamps, among many other ridiculous problems).
Another idea: “hide” the panel with the punchline with some sort of mask that can be removed with a click (and wouldn’t require a page reload). That way those of us with wandering eyes can read the comic without prematurely exposing ourselves to the punchline.
The reason webcomics have historically been modest in size is because of browser size. The standard was 800×600 for like a decade. Any bigger than that and it gets annoying to scroll around and see the comic at one go. But people have bigger monitors now, which frees us cartoonists up to make our images bigger.
(Of course, at the same time, people are increasingly browsing the Internet on their PHONE, so there’s that to possibly consider as well…)
Hiding the final punchline with some sort of scripting would be something I’d find very annoying on other strips, so I wouldn’t do it on mine. Artistically, I view an individual comic strip as an artistic whole, and breaking up that composition and intended reading rhythm with a gimmick would feel to me like Bedazzling the Mona Lisa. Not that my stuff is like the Mona Lisa, but you get the idea.
I suspected the size problem was something along those lines, although it always seemed to me that they had plenty of room to spare, and I didn’t think I was using an exceptionally large browser. Oh well.
And I personally would like to see something that covers up some punchlines (not all strips need them, like the last several DoAs. Maybe most strips don’t, in fact. But sight gags especially could use it, like Robin in the Princess Leia costume, for example). I wonder if other readers would. I’m surprised no webcomic artist I know of has tried it.
I usually browse this site on my iPod, and if i hold the thing sideways, it fits pretty well…
They’re viewing the comics on their phones, but scroll is less of a problem in that context, and users will pinch (well, unpinch) or tap to zoom when they want to look at something in closer detail. In that case, higher-res images are of benefit; ever tried overzooming something crappy, says the person who operates at 120% zoom minimum on the desktop every day? The arguments are different.
Wonder why your content area’s rendering at 980px. Seen that CP bug before, forget what one does.. :/
I noticed the new DoA Banner, did you put that in just recently or has it been up for days now without me noticing?
I’m pretty sure it’s new as of today.
I asked cos I haven’t exactly been paying the banner much attention and couldn’t remember when I last saw the old banner, so…
Personally, I like the old banner better. I am a banner snob.
You can’t fool me! The new banner went up because you couldn’t bear to have Dorothy beat Joe, taking him off the banner! Now you can have all the Joe you like! And you like that! Joe, I mean!
Unless, of course, the new banner also shifts based on common usage, in which case never mind.
You just like the idea of Dorothy beating Joe.
wow it got bigger??!? I am so excited
Wow, nobody read the title and instantly posted “That’s what she said…”?
I am disappoint.
The image appears just fine, no big surprise there, but to me it seems as though the lettering looks a little less sharp than it did before. This may all be in my head though.
The only thing I would have like to see done different about the banner is have it NOT obscure Joe’s head.
Sorry, I actually posted this in today’s comic first before realizing this would be a more appropriate place
The image is being constrained to a max-width of 980 pixels due to the width rule on #site-wide. This makes the image [which is actually 1000 pixels wide] blurry.
The site’s width has been changed from 980 to 1000 pixels in the coding since I changed everything around a few weeks ago! Maybe you’re experiencing a weird caching issue.