cartoonM!ke
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plasq hed
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Balloon/Caption ideas - 2007/04/01 22:51
Some thoughts about balloons and captions that crossed my mind...such as it is...
One thing I noticed when creating speech balloons is that the tip of the tail is rounded. Now this is one of those little visual things that bother me. If the stroke on the tail could be more pointy, that would be great.
One of the things I do when using either InDesign or Illustrator to letter comics is the ability to have word wrap applied to text. This can be helpful when having balloons overlap. This way one of the text blocks would become the border for the text of the block below it. Right now it's too easy to have two balloons overlap each other. A word wrap kind of thing could prevent that from happening.
The captions are varied and I like the scroll type. It would be cool to have an option to have the scroll be horizontal in addition to the vertical scroll we have now.
Could balloons have the same kind of variance that some captions have? Meaning that for thought balloons, could there be a Factor amount (like with the captions) for amount of bubbliness. Then for the exclamations, if there could be some way to shift from a yell to a scream; that is a way increase the length of the starbursts. Maybe even a way to have the inner parts be curved or pointed -- like a blending of exclamations type 1 and 2.
Maybe a way to have different "levels" of attributes. I could have a level of starbursts, spaced far apart and very long and skinny on top of a regular balloon -- this would result in a type of balloon that could indicate excitement or many other things...
The tails of balloons could also have additional options, like width of the base, amount of curve and type, from the single line straight/curved tails to being like a bolt (zig-zag).
For comics, the shape, size and everything about the balloons and captions are the only things (along with sound f/x)that give the comic its voice. For instance, it would be cool to have a way to shift balloons between a rectangle to oval, and then to add some roughness to them to indicate some depressed mental state of the speaker. Roaching, no not that kind, (parallel lines of irregular length) could be added to the bottom or top or both of the balloon to add to this effect.
Just look at Will Eisner's Spirit comic if you want ideas on types of balloons and such.
In essence, what I'm asking for is a way to really personalize the text/ballooning/captioning abilities of Comic Life so that a comic I use CL to letter won't be recognizable as a CL lettering job.
There's a similar comic lettering program that I've been (ah...) Tinkering with that has a lot of what I'm talking about here. At this point CL is the better program overall, imho, because of the ability to color text, and choosing fonts for balloons and captions, having multiple pages and being a "native" mac program. However this program does allow a lot of customization for balloons and captions that I wish CL had.
However, for a program that's still in it's first version, CL is the best and easiest comic lettering program I've used. I want it to be the only comic lettering program I'll use!
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