I finished some more tweaks to ComicJuice:

• IE6 and 7 are now supported, thanks to the amazing ExplorerCanvas by Google. It emulates the <canvas> tag in IE, meaning that client-side scriptable vector graphics are now available on all the major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera). I doubt Konqueror will be far behind.

  This opens up some cool abilities, like dynamic in-page graphs, mini-widgets (sliders, dials, maps, ...) and even pure JS games. There's a bunch of examples linked on Wikipedia (though most don't use ExplorerCanvas yet).

• I added support for uploading your own images rather than using pictures on the web. It uses a customized and themed version of core's JS uploader.
  
  
• I improved the clipping of speech bubbles so there should be less useless whitespace around comics, especially when embedding them.

If you haven't played around with it yet, give it a shot. No registration is required if you just want to play around.

I'm proud to announce the start of ComicJuice, a web 2.0 social mashup tool that lets you create comics in your browser and share them with others.

Update: Now with Internet Explorer support! Thanks to Google's ExplorerCanvas. Viewing comics works in IE6 and 7, while editing still requires IE7.

The crazy part is that I started working on this only friday evening (that's 4 days ago). Once I had the initial idea and a rough plan, I simply couldn't not code it.

Recently, the Belgian anti-cancer charity Kom op Tegen Kanker launched a new campaign, and used Drupal to create the website, LaatWatZien.be. While it is nice to see such a high profile site use Drupal, generally the site is not as nice as it could be, especially in the design department. This is quite a missed opportunity for a campaign in general, as well as surprising, given the number of large media companies involved.

Still, complaining doesn't get you much, so I decided to do a constructive design review of the LaatWatZien front page, and not only point out problems but also suggestions to fix them.

And because I recently started evangelising design in Drupal, I've made the PDF available for others to see and maybe learn from. I'll be forwarding this to the web masters as well, obviously.

Making such a review is easy if the you have the right tools. On Mac, I do the following:

1. Using Paparazzi! (open-source), take a PNG screenshot of the entire page.
2. Open the PNG in Apple's Preview.app, then save to a PDF. This enables the various PDF annotation features.
3. Using the text box and oval tool, annotate the document, and save it.

The only downside is that the Preview.app interface is a bit spartan and that you cannot edit your notes after saving them. Still, it's easy and relies only on readily available tools.

In the past months I've been doing a lot more graphical design, and it's caused me to think about how it relates to Drupal. This prompted me to write a rather long blog piece with some insights and a call to action. If you are interested in the future of Drupal, please read on.

I got linked this video, which contains all the fake media created for the movie 'Children of Men' (see my earlier post).

Aside from sci-fi geek fun, I loved watching them to analyse the graphical designs they used. One of the subjects I'll be talking about in my OSCMS talk about design is branding and style. If you're going to attend, here's a great opportunity to do your homework.

Having an eye for graphical design is as important as creative skill, but luckily you can train on this. Each of these ads or clips has a different look tailored towards the product and its audience. Look at the graphical elements, such as images, colors, typography and animation and try to figure out why it's appropriate and effective. There's also some public signage in there which has a style of its own.

If you have some time, a good trick is to take a particular design, look at it for a couple minutes, then try to reproduce it in a graphical program like Photoshop or Illustrator. When you're done, compare your version with the original, and try to figure out what you did different and whether this makes it better or worse. Look for qualities like readability, alignment, typography, contrast and aesthetics. The ones in the movie are probably a bit too graphical each, but you can do this for logos or web sites too.

The clips can be viewed in QuickTime and were done by London-based design studio Foreign Office.

Tip: you can slowly move forwards or backwards in a QuickTime video by scrolling up/down.

I just finished designing the poster for this year's theaterfestival at my ex-university. I already blogged about the websites for the event which I made.

The poster follows the same carnival theme as the website and reuses several elements from the 3D scene. It's rendered in a flatter composition and looks more like a mini-tent or puppet show.