Just wanted to give you guys a quick look at the process of putting together Owen’s blog for the story. For those of you who’ve read American Terrorist #4, and you all should have received the link by now even if you’ve chosen not to read it yet, you’ve seen the blog where Staggs has posted Owen’s entry about the attack on the power plant. For those of you who haven’t been reading along because you’re waiting for the full story, this shouldn’t be much of a spoiler.
My initial instructions for Fabio, when I was having him put together some graphics for the blog was that I wanted it to look like any other blog out there, like it could be about cooking recipes as easily as it could be about politically motivated bombings. Here’s the first draft:
It was a good start, but it didn’t have that same personal touch. I added more information for the “About Me” section which added to the whole humor element of it being and everyday blog. I also came up with a header image for the title. And I felt that the black background gave it both that ominous feel while still being something you see frequently in blogs.
Now came time for actually fitting it on the page, inserting it in the artwork. I wanted the blog entry and the other text to actually be readable so we had to find the right balance for making everything fit:
You can see we shrunk the video image down a bit, but that still wasn’t enough to fit in as much of the text as I wanted, so I decided to bring the size of that down and wrap the text next to it. That pretty much solved the problem, and here’s that page once it was completed and as you saw it in #4:
There as still somethings I’m not completely happy with. I’d like to come up with a better font for the Blog name, Trial & Terror. But I figured that rather than try to make everything perfect this time, since we’ll come back to this blog a few more times in the story, why not make those changes throughout the story. Next time we see it, in #5, there will be some subtile difference which I think would be consistent with someone updating their blog, especially while on the run from the law.
So look for those updates in future issues.
