Asking webcomic advice
 

No, please to no move forum post. Is no asking advice for what webcomic I am wanting to read. Is asking what to do when making comic for internet.

That out of the way, I know past attempts at speaking about my plans for a webcomic have been ignored with extreme prejudice, but here, I ask you, the kindly slightly less malevolent than most folk of NPF for help with a couple issues as Gala Chronicle begins its rise. First up is format. As we begin to work on things that will be displayed as is on the site, we need to know what resolution, size, and format to stick stuff in. We don't have a host yet, so until that happens we don't know what exactly is required for a page-style comic.

I personally use 700x1000 for my comics, which is simply a more convenient number than Brian uses for his. Thinking of it this way, with 96 pixels being an inch, it's a bit better than 7x10 inches, while also being easy numbers, leaving space for a logo at the bottom, and won't break people's pages even at 800x600 resolution.

And what format? .png?

I did some stuff with that colored picture on your deviantart. If you plan to color like that, .jpg might be the way to go, since my .jpg version was about a quarter of the size of the .png version. The color looked a little washed out, but there weren't any terrible artifacts or anything. So, if you plan for the comic to be colored the same way that picture is and to have the same art-style, then give .jpg a spin for a while. Or, just save multiple versions and compare them for yourself.

I don't intend for it to look like that, but that's a point I suppose I should remember. Where should I look for hosting?

Just as a note, but I use PNG, which is good for what I do, which is sprite work, but I do use photo backgrounds which are often JPGs from the net. I prefer the lossless compression, but if you're not doing sprite work, it may not be as important. Regardless, I hate what JPG does to colors, especially red, which it tends to darken, gray a bit, and bleed, so if you're doing color, it could be an issue and optimized PNG might suit you better. If you're going black and white, though, you might be well-served by GIF, since it's a lossless compression and it might keep the file size smaller. I can also give you the name of a pretty nice GIF optimizer that's free.

I think if you use 64 colors or less, PNG works. Otherwise use JPG. What I do is just use whatever uses the least memory for any given strip. Of course with JPG you always have a sliding scale of file size versus quality. Depending on how much you care for the comfort of your audience, 300-900 meg may be an acceptable upper limit for file size.

As for image size, I try for a standard of 1200 pixels wide and as tall as I like, with the occasional page up to 1600 wide, which is the size of my screen. Again, a matter of how much you care about the comfort of the audience. You may consider that screens are likely to grow in size in the future, and as www.zark.com teaches us Internet comics may benefit from being designed to fit on a computer screen, even though at first it looks weird to have pages wider than they are tall.

As for hosting, the only free comics host worth a damn that I know is www.comicgenesis.com . They have a bad rep for hosting so many useless comics, but if your comic has merit it shouldn't worry you.

Whoa, good thing you made that so clear, because we never read threads before we move them and also have a hard time understanding complex sentences. http://www.nuklearforums.com/images/icons/icon13.gif

Personally I like pngs a lot. They can handle up to 128 (not 64) colours; actually they can handle true colour as well (PNG-24 format) but they don't get particularly small that way.

As for dimensions, around 700 pixels width seems to work for most comics out there. Of course you can vary your dimensions according to the needs of each individual page; however, if there's even a remote chance you might get your comic printed, a fixed width is a very good thing to have. Look at Order of the Stick, for example: usually one episode is one printed page's worth, but whenever Rich Burlew puts up a longer episode, they're presented as several individual pages.

If you do get your start on Comic Genesis (And they're pretty good though they don't take sprite comics for very obvious reasons), try not to get too attached - they can really screw you over if you have enough hits and popularity. Once you can run your own site, do it.

Last I checked PNGs can have 256 colors. But anything more than 32 and I'm typically not saving any file size compared to JPGs.

Meanwhile, how do CG screw you over? Maybe I should be worried for myself. >_>