The Dream Reaper is a new webcomic being published online by Artist and Illustrator Augustinas Naslenas, working from his studio in Sheffield.
Gus approached me to see if I could assist him with his vision with an idea he had for a webcomic called Dream Reaper, we had met randomly at a show he was doing at a Sheffield gallery and had a chat about Terrence Mckenna, technology and plants, so I knew that this guy was a fellow I had a lot in common with. His art piece also wowed me with it’s mix of the futuristic, the sacred and the ancient / occult symbolism and I recognised him as an artist engaged in work that was of much interest.
He proposed creating a multi-platform, responsive template for a webcomic he had in the pipeline, based around ideas of Shamanism, journeying and dreamwork. This naturally to me sounded like an amazing idea and challenge, so I jumped at the chance to approach it with my knowledge and experience of designing for the web.
The initial brief was clear, but it was going to be challenging in some respects, these respects being the way each strips had to nicely scroll on all devices (Tablet / Mobile / Desktop etc) and how to present that best was a key element, and had to be central to the sites design. The website also provided some interesting presentation / UX / UI questions – how to present the strip, but also how best to display chapters and navigation etc.
The Final site is built with bootstrap for the front end scaffolding and PHP / WordPress for content management. This will shortly be updated to be a generic web comic theme as well.