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Alpha eX wrote:Some feedback. Do you really need your logo twice on the video? Water mark in the bottom right is fine, the other one is unnecessary and ugly when it's poorly placed over the green background.

Have nook on the right, other dude on the left.

Nice video editing though, very nice.

Good point about the logo, it's not actually supposed to be on there for the in-guide videos we host on Vzaar (instead they're meant to be put on the YouTube versions that also have some 'call-to-actions' at the end and a ticker feed at the bottom. I'll mention it to James now to get re-jigged, appreciate the feedback Alpha

Is there a preview chapter for the guide?

I think the one thing you currently struggle to match is the lovely design/illustrations in paperback guides, they're themed to the game and are much more exciting than an endless wall of text.

Though of doing any sort of formatting? Apologies if this has already been done, last I saw it was an unappealing wall of text.

If you did the digital layout with some colour and design inspired by the game, I'd be MUCH more interested.

The Animal Crossing guide has a few sample pages that guests can look at (about 3 or 4). There's certainly no GameFAQ-like 'walls of text' on these guides. Plenty of sub-headers, tables and screenshots to break the text up.

Andrew Mills wrote:The Animal Crossing guide has a few sample pages that guests can look at (about 3 or 4). There's certainly no GameFAQ-like 'walls of text' on these guides. Plenty of sub-headers, tables and screenshots to break the text up.

I'm just seeing a lot of white, straight up paragraphs. The image seems to have massive Facebook and Twitter water marks on it too, are they all like this?

Visually, it's unappealing.

Alpha eX wrote:
Andrew Mills wrote:The Animal Crossing guide has a few sample pages that guests can look at (about 3 or 4). There's certainly no GameFAQ-like 'walls of text' on these guides. Plenty of sub-headers, tables and screenshots to break the text up.

I'm just seeing a lot of white, straight up paragraphs. The image seems to have massive Facebook and Twitter water marks on it too, are they all like this?

Visually, it's unappealing.

Animal Crossing is a bit more text heavy in the samples, but further in there's tons of tables, bullet-points etc for listing all the numerous items that can be collected. With regards to the Facebook and Twitter text on the screenshots, 3DS grabs are 400x430 in size (taken straight from a modified 3DS), so to make it fit better on our site we copy them into a 1280x720 black background and in an effort to boost the awareness of our social media feeds, we made use of some of this un-used real estate.

Here's a few screens of how the site looks across various guides to dispel this theory that it's all white walls of text. If you still think it's visually unappealing well I'm afraid there's very little I can do until the next re-design rolls around at the start of/mid-September (it'll look completely different then).

Still think the inclusion of Twitter/Facebook stuff is overkill, for one thing it's nearly as big as the bottom image, low quality graphics for the logo and uses a font not found anywhere else on the page.

I still think the walls of text look faded and are almost lost when you scroll to see a picture.

Sorry for negative feedback, but hopefully you can use it to improve some how.

You're on the right track but the layout is so bland.

All feedback is good and appreciated (positive or negative).

Is there any way to view the guides off the website is a book form or pdf. It's just a bit inconvenient to get to at the moment, especially for a handheld game.

Herbi wrote:Is there any way to view the guides off the website is a book form or pdf. It's just a bit inconvenient to get to at the moment, especially for a handheld game.

Officially: We're going to offer .mobi and .epub downloads of the guides from the website in the near future.
Unofficially: Check your PM's...

Re the look. The minimal basis is good but have to agree with the stark look and feel to be honest. I think it would be better to take advantage of contrast and more furniture. I understand this is difficult because you have copyright issues with character references etc but perhaps you can find it in your budget to commission some more illustration or themed things like horizontal rules, tabs and tables. Something like animal crossing, or donkey kong would be a similar example, certainly you can make things in a similar style. Just to give things a little more visual interest and involve the reader in the world they are reading about.

Just look at how colourful a guide publish in a mag or prima guide can be. I feel like I miss this when reading a similar article with a similar focus on copy.

You don't appear to have a graphic designer in your talent pool as Seb seems to have a more web development than design background. There are even some people on grcade you might be able to commission at a good rate. Look at the illustrators club in creative corner.

I also don't see the need to create extra real estate to put in social media reference as that doesn't fit into the context of the user journey. They look out of place visually and in terms of context. You can easily place persistent references to these or as call to actions at the end of pages, articles, videos etc. You need to establish a sense of "link worthiness" before you bother the viewer with pleas to subscribe to something. By using more screenshots inline with text you might be able to address some of the lack of visual diversity.

As an aside, how are your videos performing in search? Do they bring you much traffic?

For the Animal Crossing screen shots, I doubt you need to show both top and bottom screen when the text details catching a bug.

Green Gecko has better worded my exact feelings.

Green Gecko wrote:Re the look. The minimal basis is good but have to agree with the stark look and feel to be honest. I think it would be better to take advantage of contrast and more furniture. I understand this is difficult because you have copyright issues with character references etc but perhaps you can find it in your budget to commission some more illustration or themed things like horizontal rules, tabs and tables. Something like animal crossing, or donkey kong would be a similar example, certainly you can make things in a similar style. Just to give things a little more visual interest and involve the reader in the world they are reading about.

Just look at how colourful a guide publish in a mag or prima guide can be. I feel like I miss this when reading a similar article with a similar focus on copy.

You don't appear to have a graphic designer in your talent pool as Seb seems to have a more web development than design background. There are even some people on grcade you might be able to commission at a good rate. Look at the illustrators club in creative corner.

I also don't see the need to create extra real estate to put in social media reference as that doesn't fit into the context of the user journey. They look out of place visually and in terms of context. You can easily place persistent references to these or as call to actions at the end of pages, articles, videos etc. You need to establish a sense of "link worthiness" before you bother the viewer with pleas to subscribe to something. By using more screenshots inline with text you might be able to address some of the lack of visual diversity.

As an aside, how are your videos performing in search? Do they bring you much traffic?

Cheers for the detailed feedback GG, really appreciate you taking the time to write that all out

We've got someone hired from a top Swedish design school who's already working on a complete 100% redesign of the site and it's layout (because as you rightly pointed out, Seb isn't a professional GD). All being well that'll be live in the next 3-4 weeks (we're hoping in time for GTA V's launch).

With regards to the AC screens social media pimpage, when we added raw 3DS lo-res grabs to the CMS it blew them up to massive proportions, so we needed to add a background to make it 'fit' properly (as a work around). There was a lot of black space so I added them in to see how they worked.

The videos had their highest ever views last month (6000+ views equalling just over 500Gigs), so it's definitely on the up.

Speaking of videos, here's the trailer to our latest guide for Castlevania Lord of Shadows (featuring some hard-to-understand Northern Irishman's voice

).

Dala's super cool Pikmin 3 '100% Fruits in 15 days and evey Platinum medal' strategy guide is now live on the site. Here's his - very well put together if-I-do-say-so-myself - guide launch trailer with audio voice over.

http://www.gamerguides.com/pikmin-3/

Take it away James...

Really tempted by this but as I said in the Pikmin thread, lack of themed formatting makes it really unenjoyable to look at. Might cave in, but only out of massive love for Pikmin, I have no interest in a guide that looks like a text document from gamefaqs, with pictures/videos plonked inbetween paragraphs.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, I really admire the talent and effort Dala has put in (15 days is insane!) and I really want to read it, but I just can't deal with paying for a black and white guide when I'm used to lovely looking print ones I'm happy to own and look at.

You should post this up on neoGAF, 15 days is probably a world record. I'd love to see a speed run video.

Alpha eX wrote:Really tempted by this but as I said in the Pikmin thread, lack of themed formatting makes it really unenjoyable to look at. Might cave in, but only out of massive love for Pikmin, I have no interest in a guide that looks like a text document from gamefaqs, with pictures/videos plonked inbetween paragraphs.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, I really admire the talent and effort Dala has put in (15 days is insane!) and I really want to read it, but I just can't deal with paying for a black and white guide when I'm used to lovely looking print ones I'm happy to own and look at.

You should post this up on neoGAF, 15 days is probably a world record. I'd love to see a speed run video.

I doubt web guides will ever look as well layed out as print guides (bearing in mind the guides will need to work with multiple screen sizes, resolutions etc, unlike print). It also allows us at the moment to easily convert our pages into eBook formats for amazon and iTunes, so - sadly - if it's super sexy layouts you're looking for then print will still be the one for you.

On a personal level, I don't mind how a guide looks as long as the strategies that I'm being told actually work and are easy for me to replicate (it's the reason I'm interested in using a guide after all). The Dark Souls wiki's look like horse gooseberry fool, but they've taught me an awful lot about the game and that means it's done its job (and I'm confident that our guides are much easier to read and detailed than the wiki-format).

Hi everyone, it's been a very long time in the making, but our iPad app is finally live on the app store!

It's free to download and any guides you've bought/own on the GamerGuides.com site will auto show up as owned on the iPad app once you sign in.

You can then purchase guides straight from inside the app (making them accessible offline) and they'll also be available on your website profile too.

So if any of you would spare a bit of time to download it and check it out (and give us your honest feedback), that'd be massively appreciated.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gamer-guides/id599410871?mt=8

Oh, and if you genuinely like it, then a quick review on the app store would also be amazingly helpful right now :shifty:

Website

Congratulations man! I'm working on my own book app at the moment and know how much work goes into this stuff so that is a big achievement. I will definitely download it later. Good luck.

Hello to all of you who still dip into this topic from time-to-time (I still really appreciate it). We're having our covers re-done with a cartoony style still, but with a more dynamic image on each of them. As great a job as our previous cover designer has done, IMHO, they're much more striking and eye grabbing.

Oh, has anyone had a chance to try out the free iPad app yet?

I like those covers, big improvement on the old look, always found those to be a bit dull. I especially like the Skyrim cover, excellent work.

Most are quite good but that GTA one is naff.

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