Thursday, December 29, 2005

Art of Otaku CD Blogging
So I received my copy of Art of Otaku on CD today. Here are some notes about it...

What We Did Really Well:

* The cover slip looks and feels great. I'm very happy with that. Grade: A

* The printing on the CD is good, except for some small ink smudges. Grade: B

* The launch menu and ability to view Art of Otaku by chapter is fantastic! I love it to death. Grade: A

* I really like how an icon appears on the CD-ROM drive when you insert the CD. Grade: A-

What We Didn't Do Well:

* The CD has "Inkjet Printable CD-R" written in the center. This is because to meet our deadline Justin had to grab CDs from CompUSA. Severity Grade: C

* The jewel cases in my package were scratched, broken in half, cover slip distorted, dirty, and otherwise in awful shape.

We had gone with slim CD cases. Unfortunately these proved to be much flimsier than I thought.

I consider this an A-level problem. If you get Art of Otaku and the CD case is a mess, your first thoughts are "why did I pay for this?" It cheapens the guide immensely and makes us look bad.

So what are we going to do?

We have 95 CDs sitting in Michigan right now with these CD cases. I might have to order a box of nice jewel cases and ship one with each order. But that's really ghetto.

I could also see if our fulfillment house can re-package them. But they'll probably charge hundreds of dollars for that.

In any case, we have to do something quickly. Severity Grade: A+

* The launch menu loads a bit slowly. Justin had programmed a "loading" graphic, which helps, but even that takes a little time to load. Severity Grade: C-

Overall Thoughts:

I think we did a good job in putting this thing together. Especially considering this was our first non-digital project.

I'd give the CD version a B/B+ right now, which will be upgraded to an A- once we get the darned jewel case issue fixed and an A once we sell out of inventory and address the other minor problems.

I definitely have to give a shout out though to Justin for his hard work in getting this done. His programming talents and initiative really shined through. Also thanks to James who created some very nice graphics for it.


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