See What I Mean: how to use comics to communicate ideas
By Kevin Cheng
Rosenfeld Media, 2012
ISBN: 978-1933820279

This is a small book that ultimately got me to dabble with comics professionally, as a means to convey technical information. The book is small enough and practical enough to ever be boring, especially as you start to wonder how you might apply those teachings.

Chapters start with comic summaries, followed by more detailed text and graphics covering the topic. In a sense, you have two ways to read the book.

I had read other books about making comics before, but this was the practical book that got me going. The notes below cover the new ideas briefly.

Planning with a screenplay

Use a screenplay to plan your comic strip, where scenes correspond to panels, with the following:

• Setting, to introduce the background and context.
• Characters.
• Dialogue, spoken by the characters or the narrator.
• Action.

The advantage of a script is that it closes the story, namely the context and dialogue of each shot.

Planning the graphic shots

With the story closed, we can have a separate step to plan each graphic shot, choosing the distance of the shot, or the details to include.

Outlining images and avatars

A good way to have higher quality images is to trace over images, even if they are automatically generated.

It is better to have traced images, with the level of detail chosen by us, than to have images that are too detailed.

It is easy to use Google to get images, but there are also several sites that automate the generation of figures, panels, or page layout, including Comic Life.

Why I bought this book

Kevin Cheng held a workshop at UXLx on 2011-05-12, which is where I suspected that comics might inspire supervisors to better use the Altitude uCI software, provided we could figure out what comics to make. When Rosenfeld Media published the book, it was the obvious means to be systematic and to teach other team members as well.