Font Problems (Patreon)

I must do the unthinkable...I must update GIMP.

And every time I do that, for some reason, it loses all of my fonts and I have to relearn how to teach it where to find them.

But that's not why I haven't posted a new page.

I'm self-teaching myself, and one of the things I have always struggled with is font size. What size balances best with this style of art? How big should it be so it's readable on various screen sizes? How big should it be so I have enough room to include the dialogue I need? What about what size it will be when I do a printed copy?

All things I struggle with. But there's one thing that bothers me more than anything else - when a font size changes between pages in a comic. So for a very long time I have always resisted changing font sizes, even when I need to in order to get across vital story stuff. I edit. I trim. I make it work. I think what I produce has been made better by this.

I have always written my scripts with the dialogue intended to be tweaked when I get the art, so I'm matching the passion of the character's eyes to the words leaving their lips. It keeps the characters consistent, pure, true to the combined creation of two collaborators. 

Many times I also have to change the dialogue in order to fit sentences that make sense into the panel. I've been told over and over by my artists that I am an anomaly of their clients - for most, they want the artists to deal with the lettering and word balloons. So the artists are cramming whatever was pre-written for the characters into the panels with them.

I've always been an art-first-priority person. It also means, for some artists, THEY don't have to think about where those words are going. And that's good. I want the art prioritized.

Now, for a long time I've known I chose a font size that was too big for MYTH TRIAL. More than once I have been seriously pinched for space. This is no fault of Onedollar's - he has done many things to help guide me to what would be better ($20+ patrons have seen some of these attempts in the pencil pages), and I have gone my own way. But slowly, as the story gets more complex, I have recognized my words are too big.

I've subtly been trying to correct this. In subsequent pages I've drop the font size down by 5 each page, gradually shrinking the letters page by page. But Page 66 has broken me. I just need to shrink the font - to the actually size I should have been using - and shrink it now before I get to a future page where I have a bunch of legal stuff to elaborate on that will be a story problem if I can't get it in there. So Page 66 will have it's font size drastically dropped, and when I am ready to get a print copy out I will go back and adjust the prior pages to match (but keep the dialogue in those pages). This is not a random size change, it is a combination of what Onedollar has suggested and my own education on the matter.

The problem I have now is...I have room. And, like I said, having to really think about what the most important thing to fit in that room was has made my writing better. So I've just been really working over and over in my head - how do I not take advantage of this room in a bad way?

So MYTH TRIAL #66 is coming, I am working on it and others, but the delay is so that I know that I am still finding ways to keep myself giving the best version of each page without the guardrails I'd previously placed myself in - for better, or worse.

~dS