Style
Drive has many characteristical elements of style, making it unique and easily identifiable.
Colours
All pages are held entirely in monochrome shades of blue, with the rare exception of the Drive logo (red), the Patreon signature (dark red) and promotional messages (can be black).
The actual colour range may change from comic to comic, but it usually is within one hue degree between 197 and 220, with fonts and outlines staying at 197 degree - more specifically, the colour is #02425B in hex and (2,66,91) in RGB.[1]
This is probably partly due to Dave Kellett's colour blindness.[2] The print version of the Kickstarter founded Drive book has pages in PMS #546 U (which corresponds to #465058 and rgb(70, 80, 88)).
Meanwhile, the background of the website has a similar hue of #01415c / rgb (1,65,92)
Since Page 0276, Beth Morell coloured the pages. Beth lately has been responsible for colouring Sheldon, Dave's other webcomic.[3]
Dialogue
Speech bubbles & SFX
DRIVE makes frequent use of slapstick-style sound effects, exemplified especially by Page 0286.
Typography
Quite often, sentences at the end of a bubble do not have a full stop. Exclamations are not uncommonly emphasized with two exclamation marks!!
Fonts
A variety of fonts is used, largely depending on emphasis or context:
- all-caps, normal-sized comic font
- all-caps, bold italics font, usually used to emphasize and usually slightly bigger than the normal-sized font
- all-caps, BIG FONT, usually quite big, used for yelling and header titles
monospace font, largely used in extra pages for correspondence- normal, non-serif font, usually used in extra pages for encyclopedic entries and similar official texts from the empire
Most of the fonts used are from Comicraft.
Humour
Page layout
Appearance on the website
History
The comic first got published on sheldoncomics.com. The first page dates back to August 15, 2009.
The Wayback Machine first captured drivecomic.com on Feb 22 2010. It featured nothing but the Drive logo.
Later on, before Jan 14 2011, the page has its design! It features the Drive logo on the top left of the page, an adspace and some buttons ("New here?", "Forum", "Extras" and "Store") in the middle and a RSS button on the top right. The comic section is dominated by the comic page in the center, framed by a white-ish box with gradients. The navigation on the top and on the button provide access to important pages: "First" leads to the first page of the comic, "Previous" leads to the preceding published page, "Comment" leads to the now inactive and inaccessible forum, "Share" leads to a addtoany.com page to share the page on any platform, "Archive" leads to the Drive Archives, "Next" leads to the succeeding published page and "Latest" leads to the index page and thus to the most recently published page. Additionally, there are "Prev" and "Next" buttons on the side to easily navigate the comic. The lower part of the website has the Blog entries that were linked to forum posts back then. A comment count leads to the forum page. Additional information are displayed on the left and right in darker boxes. The footer holds links to additional webpages on the site: "Get the book", "Learn the cast" and "See the extras". The background consists of stars on a dark blue background, with a gradient to black towards the top.
This design prevailed and was left largely unchanged.
On Oct 29 2013, Page 0134 is the first page to receive a title: "The Arena".
On Sep 15 2015, the navigation was reduced to "First", "Previous", "Comment", "Next" and "Latest". At the same time, the buttons on top are changed to "New here?", "Extras", "Store", Patreon"
Subpages
New here?
A guide to the story and the characters for new readers.
Extras
Downloads, fanart and the Wiki.
Store
Hosted on sheldoncomics.com.
Patreon
Hosted on Patron.
Archive
The archive doesn't seem to be linked anywhere any more, but it still works here. It features a calendar with all publishing dates linking to comic pages for the past 12 months.
Forum
Used to be working under drivecomic.com/forums/drivetalk/, but has been inaccessible for quite some time.
Tales of the Drive
References
- ↑ This is not easy to find out and might even be wrong! Due to the compression of JPG files, there is almost always noise. But there are some cases, such as wallpapers (Spark of Thought example) that are PNG files and seem to have this colour instead of black.
- ↑ http://www.drivecomic.com/news/1506.html
- ↑ New Colorist!
