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Updates for the EiAD section of Evil-Inc.com
🕑 Added 2020-05-29 16:59:47 +0000 UTCI've updated four of the archive Evil Inc After Dark stories at EiAD.evil-inc.com to feature phone-friendly formatting. With the addition of EiAD #14 through #17, the majority of EIAD stories are now available to read in the comfort of your own phone! And I'll be working on adding the same features to the first dozen stories very soon.
To see it for yourself, visit EiAD.evil-inc.com and enter with your Patreon log-in credentials.
On desktop, EiAD.evil-inc.com presents a snazzy eComic-reader format that emphasizes the full-page layouts and spreads.
Either way, the EiAD section of Evil-inc.com is my attempt to present a vastly improved reading experience.
A word about formatting...
As you've probably realized by now, I'm really excited about the potential for phone-friendly formatting. All of my comics have been uploaded to Patreon that way since last summer. When I launched the Patreon-only sections of my website, it was a keystone feature. And the eBook for my latest EiAD collection featured a Smartphone edition for which I've been receiving very positive reactions.
With that in mind, I do want to address one thing about transferring those older EiAD comics into vertical-scroll comics. When I first started EiAD, I was absolutely stoked to be able to do more complicated, intricate page layouts than the ones I did for Evil Inc itself. And that meant layouts that looked like this...
That's a page that I'm very proud of. But, it presents significant challenges when I re-format them to a panel-by-panel view. For example, Panel 5 in the page above looks like this in the Smartphone Edition.
And you'll notice that happening quite a bit in those older EiAD comics. These days, when I'm prepping a page, I have certain rules for myself — like making sure anything that happens around a "non-standard" panel can be easily cropped out. Like the zones denoted in red below...
As a result, the phone-friendly versions of those comics are much more graceful on smaller phones.
I dunno. Maybe that's too much behind-the-scenes information, but I wanted to make sure you understood (a) the thought process behind some of those panels you're going to see and (b) all of the different ways you can access this content that your membership here on Patreon supports.
As always, let me know what you think!
Comments
Brad Guigar
HA! I see what you did there!
coolraul07
Hey, some people like to know how the... sausage... [eyebrow wiggle]... is made.
Brad Guigar
That's good to know. I'm looking at evil-inc.com right now on my iPad in landscape right now, and I'm not seeing it. — But that doesn't mean it's not there! Write down what you're seeing — and maybe screenshot? — and I'll pass it on to my developer!
Jp
The site looks good but there are some issues with a tablet in landscape mode.
Brad Guigar
It's a great question. The desktop/mobile/tablet breakdown on Evil-Inc.com is 80%/16%/4%. But that's where we go down the rabbit hole. Is that a chicken-egg thing? In other words, would I have more mobile users visiting the site if they had found a receptive site when they first visited? And how many of my readers access the comic completely off-site (social media and RSS, for example)? You could run yourself ragged trying to figure it out. Here's what I DO know. People use their phones to access the Web more frequently than they use desktop computers — and more often. And that's a trend that has been building for years. (I wrote Webcomics.com posts advising people about responsive websites in 2015!) So I know that the more I build infrastructure to accommodate those users, the better I'm going to be able to connect to them!
Jp
This is really interesting. Weird question that may be too inside baseball: what’s your percentage of mobile versus desktop/tablet traffic where the compact design would be a game changer? That said, really awesome that you’re preparing for the larger mobile space.
