Once it starts to be the early morning hours of tomorrow, I become possessed by some nefarious force, trying things that should not be done.

At some point before midnight, there was a fairly normal layout with a character standing in the gutter:



That's a cool neighbor of formalism, and provides the character a stark background as the panels wander off to the subject of her discussion. All good so far...

But then the wickedness takes advantage of my exhaustion. Why not take it a step further it whispers... why not put the character in front of her own speech bubble.... and throw in the editor's note as well...



So I've come to you, MGN, looking for a scholar to explain to me why it will never work, or a devil's advocate to tempt me to break the rules with abandon.

It's not often we have these forum discussions in public! In case it's not clear, Eric is reformatting our story Hard Lessons for mobile.

I prefer either the first one or something in between the two, where the character does not appear "above" or in front of her speech balloon. Here's why:

Putting a character in front of that character's speech balloon (obviously) emphasizes the character and their expression over what they're saying. I think I've seen the effect when the point-of-view character (not the character speaking) is under the influence of drugs, where the point-of-view character focuses on the character speaking and tunes out what that character is actually saying. I think that's the opposite of what we want here, because the political debate is the focus of the story. Diminishing the importance of the words being spoken at the part of the story that most explicitly conveys their opposition in the paginated version (they face each other across the division between two pages) runs counter to our goals for this story. And it diminishes the impact of the analogy at the end because if you weren't into the debate, the ending holds less meaning.

Both! This is only my opinion, of course, but what I will do is leave that huge gutter in the first option, and pretty much do everything with the lettering that you did in the second option.

I find the second one visually much more appealing then the first one. The fact that the character is in front of the speech bubble gives (in my opinion) more weight to the words.

I have absolutely no problem with the character overlapping the word balloon and info box here, for various reasons.

1 - You stated it's for a mobile device. Most of them that I know of (if we're talking the touch-screen ones) are widescreen. So it looks better to fill the screen rather than to have large areas of white.

2 - It makes the character's speech seem like a political speech. This is personal opinion, of course, but I like it.

3 - The character and the word balloon and info box are all in the same plane, which is not the background. Uniting them doesn't bother me here, but I do think that you should consider both extending the panel in the background across the entire width of your mobile pagewidth, and adding a black border to the top and bottom. The horizontal ratio of mobile touch screen communication is proportionate to widescreen format to promote the viewing of movies on them. Embrace it.

Rock out and keep going. ^_^

I'm kinda halfway in-between the two. The second one looks more visually interesting without the stroke on the background and how it covers the whole page rather than a section of it. As for the speech bubble, I would only do it if the character is more important than what is being said. I know I'm contradicting someone with this, but to me it reads as though the character is in the foreground (and in result, the bubble is in the background cast away like an unloved toy). The caption is definitely better in this one though...
The first one though, the speech bubble work a little bit better.
(This might be off topic, but why are you using that font [Can I guess, Cambria?] for a comic? It looks a little odd to me...)

I like #2! It looks like it would fill the mobile screen much better, and the editors note works really well that way-- purposeful rather than squished in a corner.

Break those rules with abandon.

Man, I'm late to this one... but I'm going to have to agree with everyone else and say that #2 is best. I think that the elements in the first one kind of all sit on their own, while in the second they seemed more tied together and part of the same composition. It's just a stronger design.

And I'm even later than you Jason...

But I thought I'd weigh in for my own, in case these discussions ever get archived.

I like the second, but not so much for the bubble change. I'm a fan of full bleed, small gutters. And also the extra bold line surrounding the editors note feels like an all caps discussion. I like the interaction of the character with her own speech, but not so much for the editors note.

I do feel somewhat of the idea of putting the expression first and having the words as secondary, but it doesn't feel to bad to me. It might have made the words disappear had they been used in a bubble that had a gradient or a solid color that tied it more to the background.

Anyway, I know it was way late in the game. I'm sure the issue has been decided and moved forward, but it made me think about my own text problems of late, so I was more thinking out loud...

Ronaldson Bold actually. It's sort of a fiercer version of Cambria.

As to why, it's a bit of a public secret. You might figure it out if you read Jailing Fortune.

We're all about Fing with the norms at Carpe Chaos.