The Great Class Comics Phone App! (Patreon)

As we mentioned earlier, there was a company called MiKandi that wanted to crack the XXX market on mobile phones, and they wanted to make a comic book reading app for it.

This might sound rather commonplace in 2024, but back in 2012 it wasn't! It didn't sound that hard to do since comics were just static images on a page. As it turned out, here were so many unforeseen hurtles and problems!

Everything from screen size & ratio to fonts and readability came into play. Even worse for them was the unpredictable manner in which comic panels flow. They thought that they could make a reader that moved down the page, like a regular book.

We sent them some test pages that worked fine for them, but then we sent a wacky page where the action flowed down the left side, then went up to the top on the right. They didn't know how to process it!

In the design phase, we had wonderful visions of a graphic intensive, sexy app. It was going to be marvellous! In the end... everything got simplified for ease of implementation. All the graphic vanished for simple colored squares and scroll bars. But we still have the corny mock ups that we designed that never go used!

And in the end, they were only around for about a year before going under.

:(