Okay I've been real busy lately so I'm just finally going through the art threads now.

There are two issues I'm wondering about:

#1. With the influx of all the new art I've started thinking about its organization in the comic maker -- is the amount of art and categories overwhelming to new users? If so, what can be done about that?

#2. The "forumusers" category was fun back in the early days when there were really only 10-20 regulars, but these days I'm not sure it scales. Everyone (understandably) wants a character in there, but I'm not sure it's all that useful to the majority of users for that to happen.

Those of us doing forum users lately have mostly been trying to do something "useful" with them, putting them in a pose or costume that will make them versatile, and more than just a vanity piece. As much as I love a lot of the submitted forum user art, some of it is just generic people, and probably not all that useful.

The forum users I think are the closest thing there is at moment to a certain type of Cartoon style. One more serious/real looking that Kaddar for example. Maybe not giving everyone the priviledge of having their own character is a bad idea as some will be left out.

I think we should catagorize the newest characters more simply...

For example:

Professional characters: Doctor, nurse, etc could go into a professional catagory.

Just a thought.

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Okay I've been real busy lately so I'm just finally going through the art threads now.

There are two issues I'm wondering about:

#1. With the influx of all the new art I've started thinking about its organization in the comic maker -- is the amount of art and categories overwhelming to new users? If so, what can be done about that?

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#1. With the influx of all the new art I've started thinking about its organization in the comic maker -- is the amount of art and categories overwhelming to new users?

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I like the idea of having a favorites list. You could add the character picker to the Edit Account screen and when one is clicked, its thumbnail is shown at the bottom of the page. To remove, you'd click the thumbnail. That would help people like me who make series. Serieses. Seriees. Whatever. Anyway, the favorites category should then be placed at the top of the drop list in the strip maker.

I do think new art is always good, especially professionals (doctor, fireman, etc) and weird stuff (bacon man, corpsey). The best way I can think to make the list less daunting would be to start with a list like:

People
Animals
Other (Robots, weird things)
Props

Then go to Artist selection.
I dunno, I'll give it more thought. I'm trying to think, but as I'm writing this, a customer is bothering me every two minutes.

I'd like to suggest we have instead of a political and religious section but a 'specific people' section thing
with stuff like jesus or George bush. We could have stuff like the forum users put into 'specific people'. And if we want to be ultra osectified we could have a 'specific animal' section. But then it would just be way too silly.

Why not just put the new forum user images under categories named for the artist? That way they qualify as just more art by said artist and you don't get a sudden flood of people complaining about how they aren't featured in the forumusers category.

I think we should keep the art categorized by artist because it gives the only recognition the artists will ever receive on this site (other than their own personal satisfaction). I think it's great that every time you make a comic you are reminded of how much art was developed by DexX and Kaddar, and now our newest stripcreator creators, Squidrabies and Injokester.

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Those of us doing forum users lately have mostly been trying to do something "useful" with them, putting them in a pose or costume that will make them versatile, and more than just a vanity piece. As much as I love a lot of the submitted forum user art, some of it is just generic people, and probably not all that useful.

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I like the idea of simply categorizing the art by artist. By now, I'm familiar with what Injokester and Squabies have contributed, and can go straight to any character of theirs that comes to mind.

Oh, and by the way, I am absolutely the fucking greatest.

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Those of us doing forum users lately have mostly been trying to do something "useful" with them, putting them in a pose or costume that will make them versatile, and more than just a vanity piece. As much as I love a lot of the submitted forum user art, some of it is just generic people, and probably not all that useful.

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Well, I'm famous for dressing up in drag, and lord knows how bad we need a man in drag character on SC. So if you want a pic of me in a dress, I'd be willing to send it over for artifying.

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I think making pics of users who already have one is dumb. But I think it might be a good motivator to get more people active and donating if they saw that active users sometimes get pics of them up on the site.

I do like the idea of the main catagory to subcatagory idea that squidrabies presented ("People" then subcatagory "dexx" then all characters drawn by dexx that can be considered "people"). When I first came to stripcreator there wasn't a lot of art, but it was still confusing. This would resolve that problem, but I still love the thumbnail view that has been added. I think that subcatagories were ruled out once because it would take up too much space on the make a comic page (correct me if I'm wrong)? But it is one way, at least, to make the navigation easier.

As far as forumusers characters go, you can bongo mine. I'm sure the other people with a character wouldn't mind the same, if it contributes to harmony in SC. After all, I still have the ones that include me in my inventory, and, if necessary, I can always edit them later if I'm feeling nostalgic for my character.

I think the characters should be labelled with multiple keywords. Then it can be searched for, or browsed in a category by artist, whether its male, female, animal or prop, by specific profession (eg doctor, nurse, priest).

What I have in mind is kind of like google images. Using more or less keywords you can browse a wide or narrow selection of images.

For my most recent comic I wanted to use a character who thought he was cool. My brother told me to use tyler (kofightclub). If I could have searched for "cool" and "man", that would have made my life easier.

How about just adding more categories to the character browser that display characters of a type, while leaving the normal dropdowns as they are? That way new users can search for what they're after, while those that prefer can just stick with a style?

Compliment that with a New Users Guide in the FAQ to direct them to the right spots and I think everyone will be happy.

Here's an idea: how about something akin to metatags for each image? For example, my old scientist could be "male, human, caucasian, happy, dexx", and fishhand could be "humanoid, weird". Brad could then put either a drop list or a search box in the funky new art browser window that lists these metatags (if there aren't too many) or a text box and button that allows you to search them for a keyword (if there are a lot). Conceivably, this could be expanded to a few drop-downs such as gender (male, female, neutral), species (human, animal, alien, monster), artist (dexx, kaddar, squabies, etc.) and so on. When a character is selected, it lists it in make.php by its existing category and name.

This is a LOT of work for Brad, though.

That sounds even more confusing.

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That sounds even more confusing.

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All this stuff would be going on behind the curtain. All the users would see would be the search box or the category boxes.

I say just leave it how it is and if people don't want to go through all the art to find the characters they want then thats their problem.

Something simpler for brad but easier for users:

Separating out each catagory into subcatagories the same way that brad separated the backgrounds. brad moved the more popular/sleeker designed ones to the top then separated with a line of "------". He could probably do a line like "---Humans---" then all the characters in threereasons catagory that are humans would follow, for example, and so on with every catagory.

The three basic catagories I could really see a need for are
Humans/people
Animals
Other

Beyond that it just gets confusing.