I’ve been too busy drawing and re-drawing armor to come up with something clever for today’s Help Topic, so consider this an open thread to talk about whatever you like. Or ask a question about HeroMachine or drawing stuff too, of course, but in general this space is now Open To The Public.

Edited To Add: On second thought, you can also use this to post a character you have, or have been working on, and would like a (friendly!) critique about. I’ll be happy to give an opinion on what I think works, what doesn’t work, things you might do, etc., as would the other commenters, I am sure.

I’ve updated the WordPress installation running this site to 2.9 and installed the new template for look and feel. If you’re seeing weirdness, try CTRL-Refresh to reload the page. If the weirdness persists, try clearing your cache and reloading. And if the weirdness STILL persists, call Ghostbusters.

Comments, insults, praise, general commentary, recommendations, explicit directions on where to shove my non-existent design sense, etc. are all welcome. Well, not ALL — who needs praise?

I spent the last couple of days implementing the last blog layout change we discussed a few weeks ago. I’ve got it running on a test server if you want to take a look via this link and let me know what you think. Obviously it doesn’t have any real content in it beyond one post I cut and pasted, but you’re looking for the basic layout and not the words that go in it, if that makes sense.

I did change the header up significantly; when I sat down to actually code it, enough time had gone by to let me look at it with fresh eyes and I decided the original was just too heavy and busy. I think this one is a lot cleaner and easier on the eyes. I also changed the footer to match the new UGO look a bit better, and did away with the gradient at the bottom.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts. If there are no huge problems I’ll probably roll this out live overnight, which involves a bit of scariness in upgrading the WordPress version.

I did a plain text version of this once, but I thought a video would be easier to follow. If you ever wanted to draw Batman in a bar using nothing but letter shapes (and who among us has NOT wanted to do that?!), here’s your chance to learn how.

Otherwise, consider this your (late) “Help!” open thread, feel free to ask anything you like about how to do something in HeroMachine, or an illustration question, or all but one thing associated with the meaning of life.

As you can tell, UGO has become interested in what more they can do to get people excited about HeroMachine, which is great in all kinds of ways. One of the ideas we’re floating (still very much just an idea at this point) is to have “Artist Collections”, item sets designed and drawn by specific comic book illustrators. So for instance, you might get a bunch of sets designed by “Invincible” artist Ryan Ottley, or Rob Liefeld (ha!), or Bryan Hitch of the Ultimates, etc.

Would that be interesting to you? If so, what current comics artists would you most want to see put together their own HM sets?

If it turned out that I had a (very!) modest amount of money available via the nice folks at UGO to award as prizes for the weekly contests, would you be interested in that? And if so, what sorts of things would you like as prizes? Just some possibilities off the top of my head would be things like a $10 certificate to iTunes, or a discount on merchandise from Amazon.com, a signed copy of a comic book by the author and or artist, that kind of thing.

I’d love to hear your input on that — are monetary prizes a good thing, would they make you more excited about the contests, if so what would you want, etc. etc.

Thanks!

We’ve been having trouble since last night with the site going up and down. DreamHost is looking into it, my apologies for the frustration.

Very sad news for any of us old-time comics fans, as comics titan Dick Giordano died yesterday at the age of 77. Check the Comic Book Resources link for more info on Mr. Giordano’s career, but suffice it to say he was responsible as either inker or editor for some of my favorite comics growing up.

We’ve got a sick equine out here at the ranch and need to take him to the vet way off in the other middle of nowhere, so I won’t be back till this afternoon at the earliest. Play nice and consider this an open thread.

I’ve been asked by UGO to redesign the page for HeroMachine 2.5, which still gets the bulk of the visits. Obviously the whole UGO.com site has been redesigned, and the old comic-booky type feel just doesn’t work any more. And the 2.5 version, while pretty much retired, is starting to look dated.

Plus, the new UGO pages are much wider than they used to be, which gives me more room to put stuff. Part of the frustration in the current layout is how tight the space was between that big honkin’ ad in the upper right corner and the character window. Plus, I was never happy with how the controls were labeled, I thought they weren’t very intuitive with just the icons. I was also asked to keep the links to the other HM versions (currently living outside the application itself) and the social networking links UGO now has on all their pages.

So, here’s my first attempt at a full-width version. I am also working on one that would fit in the left-center wide column of the basic UGO page, with a right column for their usual assortment of links and features. That one’s not ready yet, but I wanted to get some feedback on this one if possible before I submit it. Let me know what you think. The “new”, default UGO header would be at the top, from the black bar down to the main big ad.

(Click to embiggen.)