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See What I Mean

How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas

See What I Mean

A book in progress by Kevin Cheng. Publisher: Rosenfeld Media. Anticipated publication date: 2012

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See What I Mean

Comics are a unique way to communicate, using both image and text to effectively demonstrate time, function, and emotion. Just as vividly as they convey the feats of superheroes, comics tell stories of your users and your products. Comics can provide your organization with an exciting and effective alternative to slogging through requirements documents and long reports. In See What I Mean, Kevin Cheng, OK/Cancel founder/cartoonist and founder of Off Panel Productions, will teach you how you can use comics as a powerful communication tool without trained illustrators.

This book will help you:

  • Learn a method to document your organization's work, ideas and vision in a way that any project teammate, customer or manager will readily understand and consume
  • Put the "story" back in "storyboarding" and really describe the user experience from the users' perspective
  • Include the use of comics in the product development life cycle to prevent wasted time and resources spent building the wrong product
  • Use comics as a way to engage users early and solicit their feedback
  • Sell the value of the method to the rest of your organization
  • Discover the properties of the comics medium that make them so much more than either words or pictures

In See What I Mean, Kevin will walk you step by step through the process of using comics to communicate, and provide examples from industry leaders who have already adopted this method.

“See What I Mean” Blog

365 Dudes

Andy Helms has created a blog called Dude-a-Day. It's actually been around for at least 200 days already so I'm way behind in discovering it.

The illustrations are wonderful and he even sometimes finds creative ways to represent the women in the series and themes he's drawing (since he's only drawing "dudes").

I love the variations on expressions, face shapes, eye shapes, and body language to really get the character across without necessarily focusing too much on the likeness.

Comic to Explain XHTML 2 and HTML 5

Many readers may not know about the confusion between terms like XHTML 2 and HTML 5. If you are at all into web design or web development though, you might be aware of some fuss around these two terms and what they mean for the community and practitioners. I certainly was.

My friend Jeremy Keith wrote a fantastic article explaining the whole mess in a very clear fashion. He even gave great analogies like my favorite comparison of Java to JavaScript as ham to hamster.

However, written as well as it was, I still found that it was quite a lot to process in the form of an article. Enter Brad Colbow, artist behind "The Brads", who decided to transcribe Jeremy's article in comic form and it immediately became a much more engaging and fun read.

Smashing Magazine has the entire comic posted:

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