Choosing the right comic format, Pt 1

One of the hardest things as a web designer and developer is explaining to clients “it might look great on your screen but it’s going to look like rubbish to 20% of your users, illegible for another 15%, decent for 40%, and fantastic for 25%”.

As modern web designers, we’re inundated with more technologies and methods of viewing our work than at any time before and the number of devices, screen sizes, resolutions, and screen orientations only seem to be expanding exponentially. If we travel in the way back machine all the way to 2006, designers only had to worry about Firefox and Internet Explorer. Basically, we coded for FireFox and then fixed everything Internet Explorer broke in our perfectly legitimate and standardized code. The world was 95% Windows, 4% Mac, and 1% crazy people using god knows what.

My, how times have changed.

Today, you have to consider so many more options than you did three years ago, much less 6-7 years ago. Not only have phones and tablets eaten aggressively into the web browsing market but their various sizes, viewports, and screen orientation issues vex even the most seasoned designers. On top of that, you still have to code for standard desktop browsers, which still (barely) hold a majority of the browsing marketshare to this day.

How does this impact comic books? Well, if you’re a webcomicker, it should impact your design decisions a lot, not just in your website design but also how you consider making your comic in the first place. While I’ve touched on some of my ideas for web design in earlier blog posts, I have yet to touch on how important it is that you study your Google Analytics numbers and make content-related decisions based on what those numbers tell you.

In this first blog entry as part of a series on various options you have for comic presentation, I’m going to stick to number analysis for browser marketshare. In future releases, I will examine how those numbers should influence your choice of comic presentation and how technology might evolve in the future.

As an example of how the browser market has changed in just 12 months, I have broken down numbers from September of 2012 and compared them to September of 2013 for one of my websites. It has steady enough traffic (~150,000 visits per month), is dominated by college-educated 20-somethings (much like the average webcomic, I’d wager), and is US-centric, making it a decent comparison point to typical webcomic traffic. Why is US-centric important? Well, it’s important because the USA’s web demographic numbers are nearly identical to Canada. The US is also very similar to the United Kingdom and Australia, give or take a few exceptions here and there. If you’re writing an English-based webcomic, I probably listed 99% of your audience right there.

Here are the raw numbers, broken down into three segments by percentage of overall traffic. Remember, these numbers may not reflect your audience exactly and you should do a similar breakdown of your own Google Analytics statistics, though remember that the less traffic you have, the less you should trust your numbers should your site suddenly gain traffic (basic statistical analysis stuff).

As you can see, Chrome and Safari are on the rise. Internet Explorer has taken a considerable hit during that time, dropping to just one-quarter of all visits to the site.

Why is Safari so high? Well, because desktop Safari (which holds ~5% of traffic) and mobile Safari on the iPad and iPhone (which holds ~20% of traffic) come together to create one large number.

You’ll notice that, thankfully, the worst browser in common usage today, Internet Explorer 8, is finally under 10% of use on this website. Why is this important? It’s important because Internet Explorer is an old, bad web browser. Not only does it render some things in a bizarre manner, it has zero support for CSS3 and HTML5, which would be the backbone of the current internet (and already are when it’s possible to use them extensively), except that IE8 has been holding us all back for years. The quicker that browser dies, the more we’ll be able to embrace some of the more complex CSS3 and HTML5 goodies and make a more standardized internet experience for all.

If you’re using IE8 while reading this, stop. Just stop. Go download a real browser, if only for the good of your fellow man.

And no, I’m not joking.

And this is where the world changed, folks. Not with a bang, but with a Steve Jobs keynote. On January 9th, 2007, Mr. Jobs made a small announcement that Apple, Inc. planned to enter the smartphone market. No, it wasn’t the first smartphone. No, it wasn’t even the first touchscreen smartphone.

But it was different. Oh so different. You can apply desktop and phone browser marketshare in an “X” graph, starting at that date and extending to this day. Desktop browser share has gone from 99+% to 69% in just six short years. Mobile browser marketshare has gone from effectively 0% to the 31% you see today.

And those numbers only appear to be accelerating. Within two more years, I fully expect desktop browser marketshare to be under 50%.

And notice the tablet market, the iPad in particular (which is why I broke it out into its own numbers). That’s where comics readers are heading, both for web browsing and apps like Comixology. Yes, mobile phones will be important going forward but the real rewards will be seen by crafting your comic to the tablet market, which has been gnawing into the desktop market for two years, gaining over 10% of market in less than three years of existence. In a quickly-maturing internet world, chipping your way to 10% in three years is nothing short of revolutionary.

Again, you will see here just how badly Microsoft has marginalized itself in a short period of time. When I started coding sites in the early 2000s, Microsoft had a stranglehold on over 95% of the web browsing market with Windows. Mac was a long-distant second place with roughly 4% of the market. Ten years later, Windows is in danger of dropping under 50% in the next 12 months, something that was entirely unthinkable just 5-6 years ago.

What does all of this mean? Well, in brief, don’t limit your comic-creation focus to desktops. Yes, they still hold a majority of the market but if you plan to run a comic for 3+ years, you should be focusing on the emerging phone and tablet markets, which will almost surely top the desktop market within the next half-decade. Go where your users will be in the coming years, don’t dwell on where they are today or you may find yourself painted into a corner down the road.

And that means responsive design. Changing the way you think about presenting your comic (ie. Thrillbent). Changing the orientation of your comic horizontally or vertically. Coordinating your webcomic presentation with a focus on digital apps like Comixology instead of print. Embiggening your font sizes so that readers on small 4″ phones can still enjoy your comic instead of getting frustrated and leaving because it’s too much of a hassle to read the bloody thing.

While tablets are larger than phones and offer more real estate, keep in mind that most top-shelf Android phones are close to 5″, the 2014 iPhone will surely be in the 4.8-5″ range, and that the most popular Android tablet, the Nexus 7, is just 7″ in size. In the coming years, expect to see the 7.8″ iPad Mini eclipse sales of its big brother, the 9.7″ iPad. Phones are getting bigger and tablets are getting smaller. When the dust settles, the two devices will probably be within 2-2.5″ of one another, meaning that full-blown desktop websites simply won’t work for the bulk of your users.

You may still be asking the question “But what do I do with this information?”

Well, stay tuned for my next entry, which will deal with various devices, how they’re used, and how to find a sweet spot that caters to the most devices possible.

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