Comic Report #25 - Spring Cleaning (Patreon)

This week I decided to sit down and do some things for my site I've been putting off for a really long time.  I'd been putting it off so long for how much time and effort it'd take, and it ended up taking me the entire week to get done- I put off my Kanji lessons while I powered through all the art and by the time I got done I had 190 review lessons sitting in my queue! I didn't have time to start the next comic but I'm going to do that in this next upcoming week, but for this week's Patreon post I'll talk about site maintenance and planning for the future.

The first thing I wanted to do with my site was get rid of the ads. This was kind of a hard decision to make, but I feel like it's the fair one to make for my readers.  Ads have become more and more intrusive and even looking at my own site sometimes I get popup ads or auto sound-playing ads and I don't know how to weed these things out, and I hate that they keep happening.  I also understand that more and more people browse the web with adblock, which has become something of a modern standard. I want to acknowledge and respect the people who follow my comic, so I decided to remove all the ads and make the site cleaner and safer to look at.  Patreon supporters were a big factor in making this decision, so from the bottom of my heart I want to say thank you to you guys, you're the engine that keeps me working. I'll probably make more of a fuss about the patreon for a few comic updates, but I feel like letting people optionally support the comic rather than compulsively subject them to ads is the better solution for how often I can actually get big, completed works out these days.

When I first designed my website I wanted the entire UI to be black/white/red so it contextually matches the comic.  The black background meant the greyscale value contrast in the comic would pop more, and it looked nice and uniform.  Around the time I decided to try adding adboxes that meant introducing new colors to the site's color palette, so I made a bunch of new site graphics with color to help them blend in better.

This was the first time I added a rotating set of four random character-specific title graphics, where all the menu designs lined up with the same click boxes. The old black/white/red color aesthetic was broken but the ads looked slightly less out of place.  I never fully liked the site with color menu stuff, so later on I tried to dial the colors back into more limited color palettes per character:

These are the menus you're probably more familiar with today. What's kinda fun about these is they almost perfectly reflected each character's colors in the game we're developing, except Monday and Lizzie swapped palettes.  I tried a lot of design abstraction, but as I worked on the game alongside the comic I ended up finding one specific logo typeface design that I like for the comic:

This is the new menu art. Now that the ads are gone I can bring it back to its roots and keep the site color palette consistent with the comic itself.  This design is meant to unify the design so there's a more consistent aesthetic, and also tie the game aspect of the comic into the site- all the inventories drawn on the menu page are the characters' loadouts in the game!  Dead Winter as a lowercase blocky serif is a callback to the site's very first menu, which looked like this:

When I went to make the new site art I found an old .psd file in my folders, which is the art at the top of the screen. I forgot that I'd started trying out a new character-specific design to fit around the site menu but abandoned it for how much time it was taking me to do. It seemed a little haughty in hindsight so I made the scrap paper thing instead, and now the scrap sketch art is a nice Patreon exclusive look into my work process.

With the menu art finished I hopped into the next task on my to-do list, which was to construct an actual Cast page. I used to have a cast page a long time ago, which I couldn't keep up with updating and it eventually broke on the site and returned 404s, so this was important to sit down and hammer out.  I spent the week doing exhaustive research into the backlog of my comic to sort out who all I actually drew, who they're connected to and what their personalities were, and I ended up with about sixty relevant characters in the cast!  Each one got seven lines of description, with eight characters to a page and eight total pages the final art ended up being really, really tall.  So as not to stretch out this entire post by embedding it here I'll just link to the side: http://deadwinter.cc/cast. There's a lot of little details and notes about some characters which I worked into the comic that may be too subtle or overlooked, so it's worth a read to reacquaint yourself with the cast and maybe have an "ooooh" moment about something along the way! A lot of characters I didn't formally give last names to so a bunch of people got brand new surnames, I double-checked all my references so I'm afraid I might have missed one but everyone who had a name stated in the comic already should have the correct surname listed.

The last task I had for spring site cleaning was to finally go through and create thumbnails for the archive.  The system I devised for the archive ten years ago was to have every seventh page be a small thumbnail of the comic so you could find roughly where a specific moment in the story was at a glance, with ten pages to a row so you could find a specific number easily, and to denote whether the page was a normal painted page, a black-and-white intermission page or a color dreamscape page at a glance.  The task of creating the little thumbnails got away from me so for a while all the seventh-page update thumbnails were little filler graphics, but now they're all updated and the archive works as intended.  

My comics take a bit longer to do than they used to, and in addition to this I'm juggling game development animation and generally not working myself to death every single day, taking time out for my health and mental well-being. I worry people might think I'd abandoned my comic but the truth is I'm constantly working on it, but I acknowledge the house got a little messy so cleaning it up and giving it a fresh coat of paint should hopefully keep the site looking new and lively.  As I mentioned before, I hadn't gotten to start the next comic page yet so I'm going to spend this week doing that and I'll have a progress update for you next week.  Thank you for being a supporter of our work, it's the wind in our sails that keeps our ship moving.