I don't think the speech bubbles are a bad idea for the shoes the style seems to suit a comic book feel, not so keen on the zigzag – it seems a bit shouty, or the heavy drop shadow, I would also like to see the image filling the bubble. Does your other work suit this style? How are you going to navigate to the next pair? Will you reshape the bubble to suit each item?
Tim

Hiya Tim,

Thanks for the reply....

I'm playing with different 'stems' for the bubble - the zigzag is a bit 'naff' as my girlfriend put it.

Bubbles will be reshaped for each item. This is fairly time consuming but I really don't want to rely on a straight slideshow image style. In terms of navigating bewteen pics, it's likely to involve closing the bubble and purely using thumbnails (which may get annoying for the viewer), or else fwd and prev buttons somewhere on the page - only problem with that is that speech bubbles seem to 'come from somewhere' direction-wise....Randomly loading up different speech bubbles with a fwd & prev buttons seems a bit dis-jointed, does that make sense?

The main thing is that the concept seems ok. I've actually added some white in&outlines to the bubble which seems to soften the drop shadow.
I'll give it a go without it though. Thanks dude :)

MekOne,

The speech bubbles really do go well with the comic book feel, but they are certainly not subtle -- at least not with the heavy drop shadow and lightning bolt coming out if the bottom. It may help to just soften the blow of the speech bubble some how.

*Just and idea* - how about thought bubbles instead?

Duncan

lol

Yeah - I guess subtle isn't really the overall feeling is it.....
I tried thought bubbles, but the unconnected 'o's for the stems were messy...The speech bubbles alpha tween in (fade in for none flash users) so they appear softened marginally - Switching to charcoal grey instead of black for the shadows might help too....I'll post up my 'smaller stemmed' 'recoloured' bubbles in a bit.

Thanks for the thoughts so far, really appreciate it :)