ROBIN'S NOTE ON #6

Every client I have ever had has told me their site will be finished by the year 2000. The florist told me in 1997. The bowling alley told me in 1998, and then again in March when they decided the pins should spin. I'm not saying anybody's wrong. I'm saying Dig has been on this job longer than all of us, and he's very confident.

Cone, meanwhile, has now said "..." in two strips and has never once promised anything. He's 12 pixels wide and 14 tall. For the last panel I blew him up four times, to 48 by 56, which is the biggest he has ever been on anybody's page. He took it the way he takes everything.

-- Robin

NEWS

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1999
Strip #6 is up. Next Monday a new face joins the cast: the Best viewed at 800x600 button, who is about to meet a visitor at 640x480. He has been looking forward to this for years.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1999
Strip #5 is up, the one about the hit counter. To the several of you who wrote in to say the counter on this page went up by thirty while you were reading it: I was checking the layout. That's my story.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1999
Happy Labor Day. Strip #4 is up. I took the day off. Dig did not, and if you've seen worker.gif on anybody's page you know he can't.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 25, 1999
Thank you for the mail! Nineteen of you wrote in after strip #2 to tell me NEW! is on your page too, and a few of you admitted he's been there since 1997. Four people asked if they could use Dig. You already are. Check.

MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 1999
UNDER CONSTRUCTION starts today! A new strip every Monday, made entirely of the free clip art you can find in the GeoCities.us clip art gallery. If you've built a home page since 1996, you know these guys. You may have hired some of them.

ABOUT THE STRIP AND ME

I'm Robin Lowery. I'm 30, I live in Kansas City, Missouri, and since 1997 I've built web sites for small businesses for a living: a florist, a bowling alley, a man who rebuilds lawn mowers, two churches, a bait shop, and a lot of nice people who want their phone number to blink.

At some point every one of those sites had this little guy on it:

I didn't always put him there. Sometimes the client did, after I'd handed the site over, because a page with nothing in the "Specials" section looked lonely. I've taken him off a page and come back a month later to find him back on it, jackhammering, under a NEW! that had been new for two years. After a while I started to feel I knew him.

So that's the strip. Dig has been under construction on everybody's home page since 1996 and has never finished one. His coworkers are the rest of the gallery: the NEW! badge, the lonely Mailbox, the hit Counter, the Globe who can't stop spinning, and Cone, who says "...". Meet them on the cast page.

HOW I MAKE IT

One rule: I never draw the cast. Every character is the GIF from the gallery, exactly as it comes, pixel for pixel. If you can make a home page, you own the whole cast already. Every Sunday night, in Paint Shop Pro:

1. New image, 400 pixels wide, so the strip fits on a 640x480 screen with room to spare. Four panels, two by two, 2-pixel black borders.
2. Fill each panel with a background tile from the gallery: clouds for daytime, the starry night for night, bricks when it's serious.
3. Lay in the floor: a fat gray horizontal rule, the raised kind. Everybody stands on it.
4. Paste in the cast. Most of them are animated, so I pick the one frame that's acting best. Dig has four frames, and honestly they're all the same performance.
5. For a close-up, I blow a GIF up to exactly double (or triple, or for Cone, four times) with the smoothing turned off, so it gets bigger and not blurrier.
6. Type the words in Arial Bold, all capitals, antialiasing off. White balloon, black line, a tail pointing at whoever's talking, and a gray drop shadow two pixels down and to the right. I'm a web designer in 1999. I put a drop shadow on everything.
7. Everything I add myself comes from the 216 browser-safe colors. Save as a GIF. Each strip comes in between 11K and 15K, about five seconds on a 28.8.

About an hour a strip. Most of that hour is moving a balloon two pixels to the left and then two pixels back.

QUESTIONS PEOPLE ASK

Will Dig ever finish the page?
No.

Why doesn't the Mailbox just check his e-mail?
He is the e-mail. That's what makes it sad.

Why Mondays?
Monday is when my clients call to ask why their page isn't finished. It puts me in the mood.

Is the Counter based on a real counter?
He's based on every counter. The digits are the gallery's own, 16 by 24 pixels each.

LINK TO UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Want to put the strip on your links page? Thank you! Here's a button. Save it to your own computer as undercon.gif, put it up on your own page (please don't load it off mine), and paste in this:

<a href="/MadisonAvenue/Layout/9343/">
<img src="undercon.gif"
width="88" height="31" border="0"
alt="UNDER CONSTRUCTION"></a>

Send me a note when you do. The Mailbox would be thrilled.