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Friday
Aug262011

Mad Marketing Skills

DateFriday, August 26, 2011 at 12:00AM | AuthorTravis

As The New 52 has gotten closer and closer, DC has been adding ads for the new comics in current issues. One of the things that Kris and I have noticed in the ads is that they’ve redone the logos for all the new comics, and they all looked pretty bad. This week DC released all of the new logos and together they look even worse. We’re betting that the missing titles that haven’t shown up for The New 52 had even worse logos.

I think the only logos that have not changed are the Superman family of logos and the existing Green Lantern logos (GL and GLC). Everything else has a new logo and some of them (like Catwoman) look like they’re trying way to hard while others like Blue Beetle look like they didn’t try at all. Even the Green Lantern: New Guardians logo looks pretty bad and half of that logo is the same as the other Green Lantern logos. I’m not sure who decided the Batman logos needed to look like video games set in a distant, dystopian future. Hopefully, things won’t look as bad on the actual covers as they do on their own.

Just in time for DC’s Digital push next week, ComiXology has released version 3.0 of their comic reader app. This is a completely redesigned version of their app, rewritten from the ground up. I had a lot of problems with the original application, so I was really interested to see what they’ve done with a new version. I’ve only played with it for a couple of minutes, but my first impression is that there are lots of improvements on the app compared to the previous versions, but there are some disappointing factors as well.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the app is a lot faster when it comes to updating the store and pulling down new data. This is great, because the previous app was painful to use in how slow it took to update the store with new data. Where before you had three tabs: My Comics, Store, and Settings, you now are presented with just the store on first launch. The store has been significantly expanded with new tabs for publishers, series, genres, creators - basically any way you can think to sort through comics when you’re looking to buy something, they’ve got a tab for you. This makes for a very overwhelming shopping experience because you are inundated with ways to shop and it’s hard to decide the way to begin. One of the Store tabs is your Purchased items that are just presented to you in a single list of individual issues sorted by date purchased. If you’re only interested in downloading issues from a particular series that you’ve bought at different times, it can be difficult to find everything you’re looking for. With all of the effort that was spent in giving you different ways to sort comics you want to buy, it’s disappointing that no effort was taken when dealing with things you’ve already bought.

This is even more evident when you look at “My Comics” for the what you have already purchased and downloaded. The minimalism of this “flip side” of the app is a welcome breath of fresh air compared to the busy store, but I think that’s less of an intentionally designed minimalism and more because there’s no features in this section. You can look at your comics by series or in a big list of individual issues. My biggest complaint is there is no way in the “My Comics” space to see the issues that you’ve bought, but haven’t downloaded. You have to brave the wilds of the store for that. I really like Dark Horse’s concept of your Bookshelf (the comics you have downloaded) versus your Collection (the comics you bought but haven’t downloaded), which is completely separated from the store.

Overall, I think Comics 3.0 is a great improvement over the previous versions, but the overwhelming nature of the storefront is something that could still use some improvement.

Travis, what’s on your pull list?

Kris, what’s on your pull list?