Cicero said, “brevity is a great charm of eloquence.”* A recent client project led to the perfect chance to put this idea in action. We’ve put together an entirely new concept that is difficult to explain to people in a few sentences or less. But place the concept in cartoon form, and the main idea becomes much more clear.
Now, I’m no cartoonist, but it seemed like a comic was in order for the script that my client set out. Originally he had wanted it just to be in text. But what’s the fun in that? People need visuals. That’s what we cartographers are here for. And if that cartographic role takes us into comics once in a while, then all the better!
Thankfully, a bit of knowledge in a graphics program is all you need to do something like this. I did it the same way any newbie would approach a map design project: look for an inspiration piece, then find the tutorials to make it happen. My inspiration was xkcd. Some experimentation led me to use the calligraphy tool and a few tutorials on comic bubble making (which I later discarded for the simpler looking xkcd style) and a glance at how others were doing their stick figure line art got me to this point.
It’s an extremely simple cartoon on the face of it. But as a person who’d never created one before, I even had to look up such seemingly mundane things as how other cartoonists draw the frames and how they deal with characters who aren’t really there. Professionals, I’m sure, think of these things as second-nature. We cartographers, too, have to remember that what comes second-nature to us after all these hard years of trial-and-error, research, and practice have gotten us to a great place.
I once had a professor who suffered a stroke. His class was almost 100% memorization of material–large woody plants and their scientific names, to be precise. It wasn’t until he himself had to relearn all the names after the stroke that he realize how hard it was to memorize everything from scratch. At that point he was slightly (only slightly, unfortunately) easier on his students.
The cartoons I made:
One thing I love: clients who have work that’s never boring.
*For a most amusing pronunciation of “Cicero” click here. I clicked on that link when the room was quiet and my sound was turned up. The subtle haughtiness was hilarious. Maybe you had to be there. Also, if you haven’t before, pick up a free e-copy of Cicero’s Treatises on Friendship and Old Age and read a bit of it each day. Redeeming.
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