A while ago I tried reading digital comics on my 3.5 inch mobile phone and found the experience to be less than satisfactory. Even Comixology’s Guided View technology did little to improve the experience.
That got me thinking about designing a digital comic panel layout. So what makes a good digital comic panel layout?
I did a bit of surfing around and stumbled upon this useful article on Tapastic:
http://tapastic.com/episode/68726
After studying the above article and mulling over my mobile phone experience, here’s my take on what makes a good digital comic panel layout:
- The panel being viewed should fit entirely on the screen.
- Vertical page scrolling is preferred.
- For smaller mobile devices, people will probably use landscape orientation so landscape panels will work better here.
- Horizontal scrolling should be avoided.
So the design I came up with is just to have a column of 3 full width panels which is in line with the above list and you don’t end up with panels that are too squat.