The advent of Ebanesa Morgan

Ebanesa Morgan

Ron Atkinson sent me a lovely cartoon character to use on Toonsket. His character is a tough bloke who goes by the name of Ebanesa Morgan. If you like Ebanesa, check out Ron’s cartoon blog http://ronatkinson.wordpress.com/ for more.

Storyline Forking

I thought of a feature for storybooks. If the editor of the storybook permits, another user could fork the whole storybook, then select a different set of images to create the story. This would basically allow the creation of a family of storybooks, each with a slightly different storyline. Anyone interested in such a feature?

Building Stories

Somewhere in March, I started working on cartoon support. It seemed like a fun thing to have on a website which dealt primarily with serious commercial art.

The tools for assembling collages could be repurposed for cartoons, but we had to accumulate artwork as well. I found some of my old drawings, cut out the characters, and started out with them.

At the same time, I also began to look for ways to build cartoon story-books, that is, stories that are longer than the four frames of one cartoon strip.

I didn’t want to create a large canvas, because the editor would become unwieldy to work with and it would be hard for a person to nagivate within the image. We would also need to write a lot of code to associate the pages with a book and allow users to flip through them. This seemed like too much trouble, so I just gave up on the project and moved on.

We first worked on art challenges, then on magazines for people who wanted to create a community around something they liked to do with art online.

One day, as we were finishing up the magazine feature, it dawned on us that we already had all the tools we needed to build cartoon stories. All we had to do was remove the spaces between consecutive cartoon strips in a magazine, and it would look like a continuous story.

Yes of course, there was less flexibility in this approach, but hey, it had many other advantages. Check out our first continuous story built out of cartoon strips.

Hope you like it!

User Content

Thanks to everyone for writing in.  Many people have written in to say something like this: 

“When we look for something on Toonsket, we find a few great designs but there’s a lot of stuff that’s not so great.  Can you compete with the heavyweights in the market?  Can you take on an established player?“

Well it depends.  Toonsket is a site that depends on some artistically skilled users sharing designs that others can use (and getting paid for it).  So, everything depends on whether or not a community develops around it.

To make a wide range of designs available to users and to make them easy to find, we need to do two things:

a) Create a large community of users with a large number of artists on it, so that good content continues to become available on the website.

b) Help users find the content that they are looking for.

Task a) is difficult.  What can we offer users to keep them coming back to the website?  We are considering cartoon strips and community tools of various kinds.  How would users like to have the ability to post challenges to each other?

Task b) is easier – the difficulty if any is technical/mathematical.  How do you recommend the right content to users?  How do you help them find what they are looking for?  That’s easier to do, but needs quite some machine learning systems work.  Anyone interested in joining us to work on ML stuff?

Colour Scheme

I have been getting a lot of flak and some raves about the colour scheme we’ve chosen for the Toonsket website.  I have to say I personally like the colour scheme myself :  orange and chocolate-wrapper pink remind me of cotton candy, chips and Sunday clothes.  But then again, I can see that it is garish and loud.  It’s probably time to go for a different colour scheme?!

I’d hate to lose that pink.  The other day, Sapna (marketing), Anees (design), Manish, a cousin of mine and I were seated around a table having tea and chatting, when someone claimed that girls usually like pink and guys blue.  We had a show of hands.  Mine went up for pink.  Everyone else (including all the girls) preferred blue.

That’s a statistically insignificant sample of course?

Cohan

Design of the Day

Toonsket is now running trials of a subtly interactive online greeting card technology.  This is a card technology that makes online cards feel just like a paper card.

It is initially displayed folded, but can be opened with a click.  What makes it even cooler (from a geeky point of view) is that there is no Flash involved!

Here is a sneak preview of the new card variety >> http://www.toonsket.com/card_20090401.php

Let us  know what you think of it!

Migration

We are migrating Toonsket to a new server over the Ugadi weekend (27th and 28th of March).  The hosting environment that we were using was a shared grid that was not always all that fast.

So, we are now moving to a dedicated hosting environment.  The net result should be a marked improvement in the responsiveness of the website as a whole.

There may be outages between 28th and 30th March, as the DNS changes propagate, so we do not recommend that you create a new account on Toonsket during this time.

But please stay with us and stay tuned because snappy is coming!

Greetings from Toonsket

Hello world!!!  This is a big hello from Cohan Carlos, the Chief Grinch at Toonsket, a website for creating art and cartoons and making very special little greeting cards that can be signed online.

Our team is currently very small.  Come and take a look around the office.  It’s just one room and there are two cream-coloured tables with computers and a few lounge chairs.

Look around and you’ll see Manish, the tall thin guy from Patna at one of the tables, and at the same table, yet another tall thin guy.  Well, that’s me.

And that’s it.  We’re that small!  But we’re setting out to change the way greeting cards are made and sent, and art is shared.