Choosing Cartoon Frame Dimensions

Introduction

Multiple frame cartoons often require quite a bit of planning and pre-design in order for the frames to successfully fit together. It gives you a traditional comic page style look and they tend to be interesting and varied. Often I have created a mock-up, a bit like a thumbnail as a way of working out the aspect ratio of each frame drawing, and decide how much space is needed for text.

Once I have all of my images drawn up, I can replicate the frames in ComicLife and put it together along with the dialogue. Here's a few that I've created in the past..

Some of my traditional examples

This was great, until you start to look at the modern mobile friendly sites and how our multi-frame images now become a problem.

Welcome To Instagram

Sites like Instagram are designed around the mobile phone, and they are the modern way that people consume. We'd be foolish to ignore this as a place to upload our cartoons, but there's a few things to be aware of:-

1. Consider that everyone is going to be viewing on a 5 inch screen, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to upload as a single traditional image if you have multiple frames. Images will be too small and any dialogue will be illegible. (So, upload your frame images as a multi-image posting.)
2. Instagram reformats uploaded images as a square picture, only it's not very smart about it. Any rectangular pictures will be cropped and you will have no control over how it does it. (Time to switch your frame aspect ratio to 1:1 square.)

Dare To Be Square

While I admit a square frame doesn't look as nice, it makes life easier in lots of way. Planning is easier, everything's square, so it's just a matter of deciding how to fit inside a standard layout. Odd number of frames still don't fit together that well, but it's no more a challenge than before. The comic sites are also becoming more mobile friendly, so it makes sense to ensure that you can fit everywhere.

Here's a couple of odd and even frames examples..

Some of my square frame examples

So, if you haven't already switched to square frames, what are you waiting for?

My latest cartoon available here --> http://area5-1.thecomicseries.com/comics/95/