News from Nowhere

Bryan Talbot introduced us to the work of Véronique Tanaka. He met her at the comics festival in Angoulême, it seems, where she showed him her experimental comic Metronome.

Bryan was very impressed, and agreed to help Véronique promote her work. It also struck him that Metronome was sufficiently regular in form that it could be animated frame-by-frame without further change. I wasn't entirely convinced when he showed me the paper version (I've said before, I like books, and I like the freedom of reading at my own pace and in my own direction), but having seen the animation, I'm won over. It loses that quality of comics, that the individual panel does one thing, and the page as a whole does another, so there is still a place for a paper publication, but the animation has a rythmic, almost musical structure, which is quite hypnotic.

View Metronome (for a small fee) at the Shadow Gallery.

Anne Fine's publishers have been reissuing her children's books in a uniform, pajama-striped edition, and Amazon is struggling to keep up.

Here's the correct listing for the latest re-issue, The More the Merrier (Anne's devastatingly funny take on a family Christmas), with the final version of the new cover, silver foil and all; but here, where the previous edition used to be, instead of the original cover image, there's an early draft of the new cover. The publishers have been informed, and it's possible, who knows, that Amazon will correct this. But just for the time being, try clicking through to the larger image and have a look at that strapline. ( And this is what you'll see: )

On Tuesday we hit the deadline for updating the Crime Writers' web site: the awards lunch took place, the winner of the Dagger of Daggers was declared, we shifted the new site from its temporary location to the public space and made a pot of tea. I felt that the moment deserved champagne, but we had tea first, then went out to a wine tasting and yes, there was champagne (and some interesting Portuguese wines, an Alsace pinot blanc, an astonishing deep pink rosé and Mas de Daumas Gassac). I thought I'd be posting about that, but this seems to be about web sites instead.

There is a suggestion that you should talk to your plants, that this makes them grow better. And the rational explanation seems to be that if you spend some time regularly talking to a potted plant, you will notice if it needs watering, you will pinch out excess growth while you chat, and the plant will profit from these attentions, even if the accompanying conversation has no effect.

I begin to suspect that the same is true of web sites: that the client's desire for a redesign every two or three years may be just a matter of fashion, but the exercise of applying the new look forces you to think about more than layout and colour combinations. (I'd better add that, in the case of the CWA, although the redesign has produced a site more in line with current fashions, there were other reasons, too, why it was a good idea - and not just because, hey, it's a living!) Changes may be major and structural (to do with how material is grouped, and how navigation works) or they may be minor (re-ordering paragraphs, changing wording), but the overall effect is that the site looks and works better. Visitors will notice the redesign, and that the site is improved, but probably won't notice the changes that actually make the difference.

The same is true with housework: vacuuming a room makes it look so much better, partly because the surfaces are all cleaner, but partly because I've had to tidy so much stuff away to get at those surfaces in the first place (which is probably giving away more than I should about my lack of domestic skills)!