Life in Aggro's Reception

[Bear]

Thanks for the feedback Wooster. Yeah, we have a ton of growing to do still - it's never been easy being unsure if we are doing well and not getting much feedback, but we'll get used to it. We just have to keep making stuff we find amusing and funny and just simply have faith that things will come together.

Website, website, website design. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, and I feel like now that the Kickstarter is getting closer by the day and we've about ironed out all its details, I can start working with it again. I picked up an old template I had from April and changed it pretty radically, but I like the direction I'm taking with it so far.

This is just to give an idea of what I *MIGHT* do... it's very much a work in progress and I may change things pretty radically from now until when this sucker goes live. I like the fading blocks on the sides and going with a consistent blue theme, it gives it a nice cool feeling and doesn't have the huge color saturation that the current design has. It's not shown here, but the far sides of the main column are just a simple base color, though I might do some gradient or faded block design there.

[RollCasket]

Looks consistent with the forums now also, so that'd be cool. As long as it works in windowed I'm fine, lol. I haven't touched any sort of web design stuff in a long time so I can't really speak for much of it =P

You might get a better idea of reception when you do the kickstarter program, hopefully it all goes well.

[Wooster]

[Bear]

The Bear and Pie are stand-ins for now. I was talking about it with Pie and we think the page design deserves unique art for the sides, and I had an idea that the space to the left and right of the logo might be used to indicate update schedule or have Bear and Pie say something funny, though I will have to see how it looks - I don't want to clutter things up.

The social tabs on the right side are meant to be a floating element that will situate itself at the center of the comics length, with some new links at the bottom of the comic that allow readers to share/like the individual comic. I wanted to make these buttons nice and big because I felt a lot of people weren't seeing them stuffed at the bottom of the current layout, and I'm trying to be active and approachable on FB and DA since we don't have (and I mostly don't want) a comments section on the page itself.

The nice thing about this round of coding is that I had to do something very square and boring because I was JUST learning CSS at the time and I never even really had any HTML experience. This time I'm designing completely in Photoshop knowing that I have a pretty good idea on how to code the elements with my CSS knowledge. Last time I had to have my limited coding skills dictate the design, which is cribbing PA's old design pretty badly lol.

I do want to have straight up text menus this time, and I'm really interested in getting into adding Google Web Fonts in this version to make absolutely sure the pages get displayed the way I want them to. Man, if I had time, I would also love to develop a stripped down mobile version, a way for users to pick if they want to see the blog or comic first, a way to greet new readers by auto-directing them to the "new reader" page. I've always had a soft spot for tech, and I really want LiA to have an amazing, clean, sophisticated web presence, and these are just a small number of things I want to play with in the future.

[Wooster]

I figured the figures you were using were stand ins. The absence of knees kinda gave it away. But that's what prototypes are for right?

Regarding vertically centering the social tabs. I'm going to tell you up front, because I've struggled with this the longest time myself, that the only way you're going to pull off centering it vertically is to first have the social container and comic contained inside an element set to display: table-cell. That's the only mode that allows for conventional vertical alignment. The alternative is to have a fixed height for your comics, and I don't think you want that. (I've fought for months to get that to work on some of my projects. But that's the one thing tables do right that the rest of CSS cannot).

Regarding a mobile layout. That sounds like fun. I've not done anything like that myself. Kinda curious if you're going to detect the mobile users via screen size or if they introduce themselves as mobile. If the former, check out for inspiration. Resize your window and be flabbergasted.

[Bear]

WOW! That is some high-tech wizardry right there! Pretty freaking awesome. I was thinking more along the lines of Kotaku's auto-detection of browser relaying you to either kotaku.com or m.kotaku.com. But hot damn, the Boston Globe has a MUCH more elegant solution, and no need to update two separate site! Very nice.

[Wooster]

For the secret behind the Disney Magic at the Boston Globe, check out this primer...

http://www.danstorm.com/dan-storm-article-css-15.html

I love the fact that you don't have to engage complex javascript or even server side scripting to pull it off. They rely on being sent accurate info, and in the case of Javascript rely on it being enabled.