Other Examples: Realism To Comic Book Style
We are a living comic book … and a profitable corporation
—Robert Stephens, the Geek Squad
Comic book illustration thrives on
characters and technology in context.
The aesthetic and technical dimensions of design are often so fascinating other dimensions can get a little lost. The comic book illustration style also uses clever aesthetic effects but then uses those effects to create visuals which set a scene and furthers a compelling story. So the overabundant glass sphere web tutorial becomes a domed city. A futuristic gadget depends on a future–savvy use which supports an interesting story. Comic book illustrators can’t separate graphic effects or style from content. Nor can a successful comic isolate an exploration of technology from context. Style infuses content which then can take on substantive ideas. One idea of substance from a business standpoint is “what if?”
What If You Lived In The Twenty–First Century?
Think of comics as a language comprised of two separate and vastly different elements used in tandem to convey information.
—Dennis O’Neal; The DC Comics Guide To Writing ComicsThere is no reason you should know about a comic called Radix. A lawsuit not too long ago alleged some MIT scientists used an image and basic ideas from the comic to win a $50 million dollar grant to develop next generation powered battlefield armor.
Check your calendar. It is in fact the next century comic books have depicted in fiction. You and I both know there’s a lot to be skeptical about. However there is something to be said for keeping an open mind, on occasion. Think of the comic form as a conceptual framework designed for speculation on possible opportunities, some new direction, or old challenges seen from new perspectives.
Spot color and anime style
exaggeration draws attention
Good comic storytelling starts the story on a person — the hero, the challenge — not just the super technology. What if your company had the desirable image of a superhero, swooping in to save customers from the status quo of your industry? …What if you took on the challenge of motivating a sales staff by relating prospecting to detective work? …What if you took that model of sales training to differentiate how you approach the sales training business you are in? …What if a requirment for technology was for new kinds of conversations to take place about how organizational assets are combined in new ways? …What happens when real technological progress catches up to comic books? …What if our story’s hero brought out the hero in others? …And what would your business look like from a twenty–first century perspective?
The Comic Form As Information Delivery Technique
The Yahoo! Local team found themselves needing to bring their stakeholders and team around a shared vision for their product. They considered using personas, uses case, and wireframes but found each of these communication medium lacking the context and level of detail they were looking for. After considering a number of other mediums including video, they settled on depicting product concepts through comics.
—Communicating Concepts Through Comics
Comic book style illustration is ideal
for communicating ideas about
roles and archetypes
The most valuable part of information is often unspoken or unspeakable, invisible, unrecognizable, or unacknowledged. People can get all the data and still not get the kind of information that changes the status quo. Business guru Watts Wacker sees the need for a coporate jester, and humorists like John Cleese and Scott Adams have produced videos on serious business topics. By the persuasive use of jest, comicbook designers and cartoonists could make fine captologists: “They often say that some policy got changed because while their management was in the midst of creating it, a Dilbert cartoon came out mocking that same policy. So I have been credited for killing a lot of bad policies…” (The Dilbert Doctrines: An Interview with Scott Adams, REASON magazine February 1999).
The abstraction offered by the comic form can bypass filters in an organization direct messages can’t. Consequently, designers have a method for information exchange similar to the jester at court. Publications like Industry Week and leadership studies cite companies like British Airways using the official role of corporate jester to provide crucial information.
In explaining what comics are, Dennis O’Neil provides an intriguing answer. “They are not a collection of words and images printed on the same page. (That’s what illustrated books are.) To be a comic book, those words and images must work together as parts of speech work together in a normal English Sentence. Think of comics as a language comprised of two separate and vastly different elements used in tandem to convey information.”
For a medium like the web where style, content, structure, and just about everything is being separated from everything else, O’Neil may provide a crucial alternative. With comic books, text and images, structure and even navigation dare not become separated in the reader’s perception. And as most comic book designers could tell you, vastly different elements don’t become integrated simply by sharing a common container.
Resources
- Instead of training users to avoid manuals by making them dry and boring, make your user manual into a comic book
- Andy Clarke – Think like a mountain discusses what web design layout can take from comic book layout. Very good ideas for how story, rythm and drama drive the layout. Tips for using comic panel layout as the grid system for a web layout.
- The biological wiring behind the cute factor can explain the success of messages illustrated in comic form. “A recent study at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at the University of Michigan showed that high school students were far more likely to believe antismoking messages accompanied by cute cartoon characters like a penguin in a red jacket or a smirking polar bear than when the warnings were delivered unadorned.”
- Super Branding ...and a cape is a good way to explain the branding concept without falling into common misconceptions. The advice is simple “Create a Super Hero for your clients to call upon when they need rescuing.” In using the superhero theme, my suggestion would be to explain what acts like brand kryptonite.
- Communicating Concepts Through Comics Kevin Cheng and Jane Jao. One concept is IA Classics: Tools of the Trade in Comic Book Form.
- Quantum flow control products uses a comic book style to explain highly technical applications. Since comics are story driven, focus moves off product centric content and onto overcoming problems of interest to users.
- Star Trek is credited as the inspiration for numerous technologies like medical scanners and transparent aluminum, even a warp field faster–than–light drive.
- Michael Erickson has developed sound ideas about The Theory of Organizational Cartooning, from direct experience applying it to Boeing’s 787 project management.
- Will the next big thing in mobiles come from comics? “Once the idea is suggested, it is extraordinarily obvious how suitable it is. Many mobile phones now have a colour screen not far from the size of a typical frame in a comic. The bandwidth requirement for a series of static pictures is far lower than that for video, especially if the text is handled with ingenuity.”
- A Case for Web Storytelling: A List Apart “Much ink has been spilt lately bemoaning the lack of quality content on the web. “Sure the site flashes and whizzes and startles, but what does it have to say?” This type of complaint assumes an incomplete, overly stark dichotomy: namely that sites are made up of “style” and “content.” …The solution is for graphic designers to begin exploring the narrative possibilities of the web as a communications medium.”
- “Science is the rubric for the investigation of ideas, and science fiction is a fertile ground for those ideas. It’s where the ideas come from. You can’t explore an idea if you haven’t imagined it. The influence of science fiction on scientists is profound.” Gregory Benford on Science Fiction by Ami Albernaz; Science&Spirit
- Companies like Adaptec, Jack In The Box and even Merck have used the comic book style to make communications more acessible to audiences. The Geek Squad modeled branding efforts on comic books. The new Lanchester Strategy sets out a complicated business topic in Japanese comic (manga) style. Characters are supporters, opponents and those neutral to the strategy, setting up challenges and story situations similar to what the reader could expect to face.
- Promotional comics generate word of mouth online (Kenwood’s futurereadyalready) or in offline efforts like promotional comic direct mail pieces. Boardroom Reports, one of the savviest direct response marketers, used a multipage comic book promotion to catch attention.
- MIT Tecnology Review, The Tomorrow That Never Was, Talks about retrofuturism, comic books, and the yearning for a more hopeful technological view. The basic what–if: what would the world be like if some of the concept designs actually got into shipping product?
- Wired article covering the Radix versus MIT tussle. A term being applied to a large variety of organizations (including the creatives) is “failures of imagination.” This at the same time there is a recognition and promotion of innovative thinking skills (complete with Powerpoint stack). A plotline, populated by many outlandish characters, which would make for a fine comic book story if it weren’t so unbelievable.
- Scott McCloud has some ideas about comics and interfaces on his site. The Comics in Education site has resources for using comics to teach.
- A list of John Cleese videos on customer care, balance sheets, budgets, telephone sales and other serious business topics. (And yes, it is That John Cleese)
- British Airways appointed Paul Birch as an official corporate jester. In the paper The Organizational Fool Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries provides case examples. The corporate jester is one way for organizations to confront what Jim Collins calls the brutal facts about their business.
- Blambot is a comic book style web site which fits product to style.
- The Dilbert Doctrines: An Interview with Scott Adams, REASON magazine February 1999
- The DC Guide to Writing Comics; Dennis O’Neil Watson–Guptill Publishing 2001
- Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, & Worlds by Chaim Gingold
Direct Mail Promotion:
Boardroom Reports