Caine's Digital Toolbox 2

Back in the Summer, Caine gave us a nice rundown of some great Web Resources for Comic Creators that are available on the web. So, today we are posting a follow up to that popular article, going over more tools that every Digital Comic Book Publisher/Creator/Provider should think about keeping handy, put these links in your Favorites as you begin working on your next comic!

MOTION COMICS
Love 'em? Hate 'em? Haven't given 'em much thought until just now? Motion Comics are just that, comics in cinematic motion which one could loosely label as "animation". They're tough to do well. You have to time them just right with the appropriate amount of images set on a timeline that matches the audio files. Lots of software, such as Adobe Image Ready, can be used to produce animation that looks quite good but now you don't have to... check out VoiceThread!


With VoiceThread, group conversations are collected and shared in one place from anywhere in the world. All with no software to install. A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too. Users can doodle while commenting, use multiple identities, and pick which comments are shown through moderation. VoiceThreads can even be embedded to show and receive comments on other websites and exported to MP3 players or DVDs to play as archival movies. ~VoiceThread

While producing "Motion Comics" is not VoiceThread's intended use, the tool seems tailor made to get it done.

WEB SITE CUSTOMIZATION
Making a webcomic? Hosting a digital comic? Running an interactive fan forum? No one wants a plane Jane vanilla web site that looks like everything else thats all ready out there. Completely customizing your website however can require quite a bit of design training. Now with typekit customizing at least one portion of your site, the text, has been made easier.

Add a line of code to your pages and choose from hundreds of fonts. Simple, bulletproof, standards compliant, accessible, and totally legal. We're working with foundries to bring the best possible fonts for your website. Your fonts will be served from a robust network built with hundreds of servers worldwide. ~TypeKit

BONUS - If you're into fonts, and you've not discovered BLAMBOT then you should check them out. They offer both paid and free fonts and are supported by an active forum. Many of their fonts are used by professional comic publishing companies and will give your lettering a slick look you won't get with your standard freeware fonts.

BRANDING & BRAND MANAGEMENT
With you comic comes a publisher or publishing company. Whether you're a one man operation cranking out one comic a month, or a group of people who do a bit more you'll have a brand that requires some amount of management (if nothing else you'll want to spread the word about your comics on sites like twitter and facebook).

ListiMonkey allows you to monitor your brand and its products on twitter (focusing on twitter's new list feature).

Monitor Twitter Lists for keywords. Get free email alerts whenever a keyword appears in Twitter Lists of your choice. ~ListiMonkey


MASS MARKET APPEAL
Doing everything you can to get your comics into the hands, or feed readers, or mobile devices of your fans? Always on the look out for ways to generate new fans? Why not translate your web comic or blog into other languages?

Google Translate tools offers some cool translation tools for both webmasters and the average internet user who wants to read webpages in different languages. The three tools offered by this service are Google’s website translator, translation bookmarklets and the translation feature in Google toolbar. The website translator lets you translate your site by creating a drop down translation widget. It generates a snippet of code that can be easily added to the site. ~MakeUseOf

I plugged a FlashBack Universe post into the translator as a test and here's what it gave me without any need for instructions at all.



Think of all the untapped markets brimming with fans out there....

Have a happy Holiday,

Caine