Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Comment Wall



14 comments:

  1. Hey Dallas! I really like the idea for your storybook - characters like Jambavan were very important to the plot of many stories within the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and other Indian mythology, but I feel that more background on the characters would further help understanding of individual stories. Here is some of my feedback that I think may help your story:
    (1) I'd consider revising the backgrounds for your stories/introduction page to be easier to read. On the homepage, the red text can be difficult to read. On the introduction, the white text periodically blends with the stars or other light parts of the image and words can be difficult to read. With such a great start, I think it would be beneficial to direct readers to the actual text instead of being stuck on the background image.
    (2) Consider splitting the information into paragraphs. It is easier for a reader to read a short paragraph than it is for the reader to read a big block of text.

    Really, this is the only significant feedback I have for you. It is a great start and offers enough information to intrigue readers without giving too much away.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Dallas! I think you have a really creative and focused idea for your storybook. Using the stories of some characters who we have not seen much of in the Ramayana and Mahabharata (versus, say, Rama and Krishna) allows you to both inform your reader about stories with which they are likely not familiar, and be creative with unique stories from ancient Indian tradition. I think that adding a little more background about who exactly your characters are into your introduction would really help the reader to understand their stories which follow in your storybook -- since the characters of your storybook don't have a lot of backstory in the Ramayana or Mahabharata, giving the reader more detail about them is important! Also, the background images, while beautiful art, are very distracting from the words on the page. Maybe try to get a text box that's solid color behind the words, so that you can keep the nice background images but also help the reader to clearly read what you're sating about your storybook.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Dallas, I am a big fan of your storybook topic! I was not familiar with the concept of the familiars despite reading about several of them already. I am particularly interested in Jambavan as he is a part of my project; I will definitely be back to read his part! The story of Parashurama is a tragic one that I had not heard of before, but I am glad I know it now! The writing style let me feel the injustice his family suffered and be happy with his revenge! I wonder if had met warriors he could not best? In most stories, I also would like to know how they would fare against Rama or Karna!
    Like the other commenters said, my biggest issue was the colored text on top of pictures. This issue appears on most of the storybook pages and is not a difficult problem to fix! Overall I enjoyed the story and can't wait to see more!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey Dallas,

    So far I really enjoyed your first story and introduction. My first comments will be on your overall layout. I like that you chose Wix to use because it gives variety to the google sites I see everywhere else. I enjoy that your pictures cover the whole page, but be careful about the color of your words because on every page so far the words would bleed into the picture so it made it difficult to read. Maybe make the picture just the top of the page if you can because I think that will make it more simple and not distract from the story.

    I like how your stories will be in the first person. It helps give insight to the character themselves. How you tell it reminds me of how it would sound if I was sitting and listening to him tell the story himself. There are definite overreaction.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Dallas!

    The story and introduction I really enjoyed reading, you have a really creative sense on how you want to write these stories. I really like how you are using the first person point of view to write the stories. The layout of the website is easy to use and easy to find everything, I like that you added a tab at the top for the comment wall.

    The story was really creative and it was easy to follow and read. I think the only thing that I would change is how the story is formatted. When it comes to conversation and transitioning from different parts of the story, I think more breaks in the context would be nice to see where the different points in the story come in. Overall, your story telling and creative mind really make for good story telling and I hope to have your website pop up in the feed again so I can follow along as the stories build.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Dallas,

    So cool to see a Storybook on a Wix site! I think it's great that it comes with so many features that you can customize. This considered, just a small formatting concern I noticed was the small white font against the busy background made it hardly legible when you scroll just right and the words disappear. Also, you might want to consider separating your character descriptions into single paragraphs of their own. I think this small change would help immensely to break up the big block of text. Also, maybe this is just my fault for misunderstanding but after you list early on in the text the 7 immortal beings, you indicate which of these you've selected. My confusion here is that one of these, Jambavan, was not in that list as far as I could tell? Unless this person happens to go by two names and I have just missed or forgotten this. These things aside, it seems you have a very clear and well-described idea for your characters and the context of your stories going forward. Including this in the Introduction is a great sneak peek at what we can expect in the pages to come!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi Dallas! I haven’t seen a storybook project using a Wix site yet, so I think that’s great! I love the images that you used. They’re gorgeous and fit the vibe of your project nicely. It seems like you’ve put a lot of thought into the images chosen. I did have quite a bit of difficulty reading any kind of text that was put onto the images however. There wasn’t enough contrast between the font color and the image background. The green chosen for your story looks nice though! I like your topic a lot. I don’t know much about it. I’m interested to see where you go with it. Your writing style flows well and fits the tone of your project well. Your introduction does a good job of explaining what we should be expecting. I think this will turn out nicely! I look forward to your other stories!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hey Dallas! This week we are supposed to be focused on images, so that's what the first half of my comments are going to cover. I really enjoyed that you had such large images. The images don't exactly jump out since they are the background, but once I started to look into the images, I really enjoyed them. I'm really glad that you added a transparent background to the text so that I could read. Overall, I think your images are very good!

    My biggest recommendation for you is to change the color of your header bar. It was fairly hard to locate the pages to navigate to a new page since the bar and the text are both black. I really enjoyed your story about Ashwatthama! I remembered reading about him and being interested in learning more, and your story has done a great job of a further introduction to Ashwatthama. However, I think it would drastically help your story if you went through and revised how you used commas. If you still have to do revisions on this story, I'd recommend doing the comma strategy. And at one point you used "ales" to say "cured his ales", but I think you had meant to say "cured all that ails him". But overall, this is a great story and I enjoyed reading your project!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hey Dallas!

    I am really glad I got to visit your project page this week! When first visiting your page, I first noticed your image. This week we are focusing on images and I have to say I really like this one. It had a lot of unique aspects to it and I kept finding new things about it that I liked. One thing I want to note is the color of your headers and titles. Although I like the red, I would recommend making the image background plain and inserting that image somewhere else or changing the color of the title to make it stand out more. On your intro, I loved this background image. It fit perfectly with the story you were telling. The white colored letters also stood out against this image so it looked great! Overall, great job, and I am excited to read more of your projects to see how they progress!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hey Dallas,

    I already commented on your storybook once, so my comment is above. This time around I read the story about Ashwatthama. I really enjoyed this story. It puts me in a spot where I do not know if I should feel bad for Ashwatthama or be glad that his powers were taken away. How you told the story puts the readers in that dilemma and thats a great thing for a story. It allows sides to be taken.

    One thing that I thought could be done is that you should put and extra space in between the paragraphs. There are a lot of words in these stories and my eyes got lost a few times and it was difficult to find where I had left off. Also, the heading with the other stories, the color of it is not always easy to see the titles. Changeing the color or position of that would help navigation be a little bit easier. Overall, great story!

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hey Dallas! Your Storybook was really fun to read. It has a good flow to it, and I like how informative your Introduction is. One thing I noticed appearance-wise is some things are really difficult to see because of the coloring/background images. The black ribbon with the pages in black are really difficult to see and navigate--is it possible to make the words outlined in white or something, so they're readable against the black? The text is pretty readable on the two stories, but the title page and intro are a bit tricky.

    With regards to how you break up your paragraphs, I'd say in general it's pretty good! The pacing of the stories are good, and the paragraph breaks generally match it. The intro was a bit of a big block of text though, so I would recommend breaking it up into a few more paragraphs, like your other stories are. Additionally, I think there are some rules about starting new paragraphs when dialogue is added? I noticed a couple of cases of that in the second story.

    Overall, it was really fun to read, and I look forward to seeing how it all comes together in the end!

    ReplyDelete
  12. Hi Dallas!
    This is my first time visiting your site, but I like how you have it set up. I like that the Chapters tab at the top has a drop down option for the stories. I also really enjoyed the pictures you selected for your backgrounds. It makes it more professional looking.

    This week we are talking about paragraphs. For your intro, it is a bit hard to read since it is all one paragraph. You might consider separating it up a bit. For instance, you could make the background on each of the characters you selected their own paragraph. I think this would make it flow a little better and be easier to read. For the story of Parashurama, I think you did a good job breaking this one up into paragraphs that flowed well with the story. However, there are two paragraphs that went indented correctly, other than that, you did a great job with this story!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Hi Dallas!
    Overall, the website is good and I like how you have the drop down menu the stories. However, I think if I was to change one thing that would be the font on the front page where the tabs are at to select different pages. With the black font and the picture on the homepage it makes it a little hard to read what they are.

    For this week it is about looking at the paragraph structure and how it helps the reader when reading the story. With the most recent story that you posted I felt you did a good job at the retelling of the story. The use of paragraphs were set at just the right moments to give a break from the story. You also used new paragraphs were the story was changing from one subject to the next, with this it made the story easy to follow and easy to read.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Hi Dallas!
    First of all your story page is cool, personally I had a hard time reading your introduction because your writing is white and part of your background is as well. So you could consider changing that if you had anymore complaints. Your intoduction was very informative and I felt ready to dive into the story. It gave great detail on each character and gave me a total breakdown that I needed to read the story. Well done on that. I think that you alos creativly designed your portfolio so I enjoy your site in general. Well done with this!

    ReplyDelete