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Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 5:00AM In response to a request for a guide to hand-lettering, I prepared the brief overview. The basics I'm describing below apply to a pretty straightforward alphabet. As you get better, you will find small ways of personalizing this that will end up identifying your lettering as your own style.
Monday, January 18, 2010 at 1:06AM We're going to approach the Banner Ad Hot Seat a little differently than the Web Design Hot Seat. Instead of taking each ad on an individual basis, I'm going to group a few ads together that I think share some common properties and talk about them as a group.
First, let's talk about an ad on a Web site. This is what I've experienced in Web advertising.
So...
Let's face it, you can design the most beautiful ad in the world -- but if it doesn't convey a message, it won't be as successful as it should be. Let's take a moment to talk about message.
Friday, January 15, 2010 at 5:00AM Today's Archive Dive is from May 6, 2009. It's my own personal strategy for maximizing the use of Project Wonderful. Before you read, please realize, this will only work if you're also selling merchandise.
Project Wonderful is a very useful tool for displaying ads on your webcomic site. Through this system, prospective advertisers bid on ad space on your site. The highest bidder wins the space. However, I think many webcartoonists are undermining their own best interests by not using PW to its fullest extent. Specifically, they're not setting their minimum bids high enough and they're misusing their "Your ad here" message
Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 5:00AM For those who don't know, my background is primarily in management consulting. It was a career filled with two-week stints in hostile environments that, in short, needed to figure out how to achieve X with the means of Y. Even though I specialized in enterprise technology, each segment was a little different and each company had their own way of doing things. In order to cope with these variances within tight timetables, every consultant had these very broad-stroke models beat into our heads to help understand how certain industries ticked. Businesses are businesses, but there are certain base-layer truisms across the board, often portrayed as simplified charts or graphs that give an easy-to-understand perspectives that, although usually fitting no single company, gave you an understanding on what the landscape was.
From those experiences I've been permanently wired to think that way. Everything I see has structure. There's always some sort of system, and no matter how organic the scenario, I immediately compartmentalize it into something that I can base my thinking and learning on.
That said, I figured I'd be a good exercise for my initial piece to give the webcomic space a go, as we could base future discussions and discourse on it. By no means is it the end-all, be-all snapshot of the industry, but it's a solid starting point in which to gain perspective from. You guys are paying for this stuff, so I'll try to use as many hard numbers as I can to give you a good idea of what category you may fall into. I'll also preface this by saying again, not everyone will fit into this paradigm, as there are always exceptions to any ecosystem.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 12:01AM 
Subscribers to Webcomics.com are eligible to get tables in the Webcomics Pavilion area of the Chicago's Comics and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) for a special creators' discount of 15%.
That comes to a total savings of $60!
In other words, members who take advantage of this offer will have made their subscription fee back TWO TIMES OVER!
I want to take a moment to thank our subscribers for helping us lay down the foundation of a new community that can foster these kinds of partnerships.
As you know, moving to the subscription model has caused intense debate, but one of the benefits of this move has been my ability to invest more time and resources into adding value for subscribers.
And it's only January.
Log in to take advantage of this offer.
These tables will be 2'x8' and will include two chairs. They will not be in Artists Alley; they will be in the Webcomics area of the show floor. Tables will be distributed on a first-come/first-served basis.
