PanelJam deceased

When I first built PanelJam, I had this really clever idea to save a ton of bandwidth. I knew that image hosting can grow costly, and I wanted to nip this worry right in the bud.

Rather than storing images as PNGs for users to download, I thought it would be really nifty to compress everything as serialized SVG strings in the database. "It will save so much bandwidth! And it doesn't have to be bitmap!" I exclaimed with pride and joy...

But oh, how wrong I was.

You see, this approach had two fundamental issues that I had to learn through trial and error.

1. Yes, this saved bandwidth, but...
   I could produce series of images with fewer HTTP requests and no files to download other than the HTML of the page. However, what I hadn't counted on is that browsers don't really know what to do with serialized SVG data. So, in order to render these comic panels, I had to write Javascript for the client-side to recompile the images on page load. At first, I thought this was grand... but really, it was a terrible idea. Requiring compiling of the images through Javascript meant that the website ran terribly slow for those on lower-end computers or mobile devices. So terribly, I can't believe anyone stuck around. Whoops!

2. SEO Woes...
   As is painfully obvious to me now, if you don't have image files for your images to point to, your images won't give you any help with getting indexed by Google. On top of that, because of the ridiculous structure built by outputting images as code, I was hit with another SEO penalty, "Low text to HTML ratio - too much HTML". Whoops, again!

Well, you build and learn I guess... (but hopefully you don't have to make those same mistakes :) )

Have you ever heard of the book, "Evocative Objects: Things We Think with", by Sherry Turkle? In the SaaS and product space, perhaps not... this is a book about the emotional connections that can be imbued through industrial design. That is, how physical objects can create interest by evoking emotion.

"Evocative Objects" is a collection of short stories about different objects in people's lives detailing what these seemingly simple products did that made people remember them.

When I finished reading this book, I wondered what I could design to create similar responses. I didn't know what problem I was going to solve yet, or what at all I wanted to build. All I knew is that I wanted to evoke emotion, and I wanted to get better at design and development.

So, I started by deciding what I wanted to evoke. After plenty of brainstorming, I settled on evoking "suspense", "connection", and "surprise".

As a designer and artist myself, I'd always had an interest in comics. So reverse engineering how I might deliver those emotional responses led me to create www.PanelJam.com where artists create collaborative comics one panel at a time.

On PanelJam, artists draw panels and pass them on to public to continue their comics (suspense).

After other artists have added their panels, everyone involved receives an email that their comic is complete and ready to view (surprise).

And of course, this creates a platform for collaborative art sourced by the community (connection).

Perhaps this is was an unconventional way of arriving at a product, but I've been so pleased with the results. Even though I spend much more of my time designing and developing these days than drawing, I find PanelJam evokes these emotions in myself as I grow the community and wake up to new art every day.

I used to draw a lot.

Not unusual in the least, I had the artists' bug and dreamed of becoming the best artist that I could be. But you know what this meant? Hours and hours, completely alone as I sat in my bedroom practicing my skill.

One summer off from high school, I decided to make it my full-time job to become a better artist. I would pick up books from the library on anatomy, character design, illustration, life drawing, etc. and just troll through practice on my lonesome.

For at least 40 hours a week, I kept myself locked away in my bedroom as I practiced gesture and still life.

Did I improve? Sure... but it also led to burnout. Art practice requires so much time without others, and I knew there could be better ways to learn. At the end of the summer many years ago, I knew I would have to find a better way.