draw your own comics

January 10, 2006

I missed this when it was posted to the OpenLaszlo weblog in Nov, but I really like this site which lets you draw and publish your own comics. There’s a pretty nice app which let’s you draw comics.

There are some really nice parts of the UI to let you specifiy the size of the frame and switch between frames you are editing. The drawing tools are pretty basic, but effective. For some odd reason, it took me a few minutes to realize I could drag the drawing tools palette outside of the yellow area. It’s interesting to notice yourself making assumptions about a new UI. I’m still not sure why I made that assumption… but maybe I just expected that yellow area to be there for a reason. I really like the representation of stroke width (pictured to the right). There are a lot of nice details they got right, including being responsive to feedback when I sent them a note with my critque.

Here’s a comic strip that I drew with my feedback on the site:

It’s a bit of a scrawl. Mouse-drawing was never my strong point. I lost the stylus for my wacom tablet a while back. This site inspired me to buy a new one this morning. There’s a nice little section which generates an HTML snippet to easily add strips to your blog. Maybe I’ll be inspired to add more pictures to these blog entries if it can be this easy :)

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