Forum:CT Archive/Speech bubble blanking, redux

It's been the good part of a year since our first CT on this. The previous CT closed with 2 people in favor of blanking, 12 in favor of removing bubbles as long as it didn't alter the text, and 10 in favor of keeping all bubbles and text. We seem to have landed on "Remove or blank if you want to, or don't."

Simply put, I think blanked speech bubbles just look bad. The character is clearly speaking, there's obviously something supposed to be there, yet it isn't. At best, it looks like a bunch of random bubbles floating around an otherwise normal image, at worst, it looks like a joke. Is text distracting? IMO, not nearly so much as a big white space in the middle of the image; negative space is much more obvious than a filled-in area of text. And, finally, in many cases, text adds to the image; sometimes it's even the point of the image.

However, I think there are cases where an argument can be made for partial blanking; a bubble on the edge of the screen, where text is partially cut off, might look worse with the text (or part of the text, in this case) left in. Some have also argued that out of context lines can be blanked; I personally don't agree with this, as I think that it creates the same aesthetic problems I mentioned above.

So rather than go straight to a vote, I want to open this to discussion first: What situations do people feel blanking of speech bubbles should be a) mandatory, b) optional, or c) forbidden? Not all of those need answers.

Discussion
My answers: No blanking should be mandatory; I really don't like forcing images to be modified. Cut-off text, I'd say can be optional, and everything else should be always kept, per my arguments above. - Lord Hydronium 06:18, 16 November 2007 (UTC)