See What I Mean

Book Release

2012-12-05T08:53:00Z

I'm pleased to announce the release of my book, See What I Mean. Whether you're a fan of comics as a communication tool, or just looking for new ways to communicate your product, process, or ideas, I think you'll enjoy this book. The book will be on sale on Rosenfeld Media starting around tomorrow and there will also be digital, Kindle-friendly versions available there. We prefer if you bought direct, but if you are so inclined, leave a review over on Amazon, as that will help with visibility of the book!

It's been a long road leading up to this book, from the first Dragon Ball Z manga comics I drew as a kid, to drawing a comic for my undergrad engineering newspaper, to announcing the book back in 2008, finishing the first draft in the woods, and finally, completion.

Thanks to everyone's support, in particular my wife Coley's, and for those who've been asking for this book, thanks for your patience. I hope you like it.

Comic to Explain XHTML 2 and HTML 5

2009-08-05T12:05:14Z

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:

Communicating Concepts With Videos

2009-08-03T04:01:30Z

Although See What I Mean is about communicating product ideas with comics, I am always interested in alternative means to do the same. In particular, it's interesting to look at alternative medium and compare the strengths and weaknesses to comics.

For example, video is a very powerful means of communicating ideas and concepts. It's the epitome of what comics convey--a vision of the future and end product within the context of use. The problem usually lies in the production cost both in skills and time.

This collection of videos used to communicate user experiences compiled by Adam Little is a great showcase of how powerful videos are and how much effort they can be.

8 Ways to Explain the Economic Crisis

2009-03-02T16:10:18Z

There are so many ways to explain things. Words, pictures, words with pictures, moving pictures, moving pictures with voice, just voice, or moving people with voice (movies).

A study by Siegel+Gale found that 75% of those surveyed believe complexity played a major role in the current financial crisis.

"Three-quarters of survey respondents (75%) say that complexity and lack of understanding have played a significant role in the current financial crisis."

Fortunately, when it comes to the financial crisis, there's no shortage of explanations. As I'm writing a book on using comics to explain ideas, I was initially drawn only to the comic explanations but as I researched further, I found a slew of great explanations across various medium. Looking at them together really helped me pick out the strengths and weaknesses of each. I've decided to put together these explanations here.

1. The Subprime Primer: Comic / Slideshow
From BusinessPundit.com comes a low fidelity (and lowbrow) walk-through of how a "stinky" mortgage goes from Ace Mortgage Broker's to the RSG ("Really Smart Guys") Investment Bank in the form of a slideshow/comic. Unfortunately, while entertaining, it doesn't paint the whole picture.

2. This American Life: Radio / Podcast
There are two episodes of This American Life, both of which include great insights and explanations into the crisis. The primer, "The Giant Pool of Money", was coproduced with Planet Money and is definitely one of my favorite explanations. They have a follow-up episode, entitled "Another Frightening Show About the Economy". It never ceases to amaze me how this show manages to tell such intricate stories and explain complex concepts with audio alone.

3. Informed Trades Crash Course: Video
While the explanation is quite detailed, the use of video here isn't harnessed at all here, making it little more than an audio track. Few audio tracks challenge 'This American Life' in their clarity.

4. Economic Meltdown Funnies: Comic
A donation supported graphic novel that is a co-production of Jobs with Justice and the Institute for Policy Studies -- Program on Inequality and the Common Good. Tales of the meltdown as narrated by a Bison... or a Buffalo depending on which page you're reading.

5. The Crisis of Credit: Animation and Voice
A fantastic independent project from designer Jonathan Jarvis maximizes the utility of video--moving the diagrams and talking over them to help explain process and flow. If you enjoy this style, you'll also like Common Craft's economics series.

6. Diamond and Kashyap: Interview
The Freakonomics blog on New York Times has an interview with Doug Diamond and Anil Kashyap, two University of Chicago Booth School of Business professors about the details of the economic crisis.

"Fannie and Freddie were weakly supervised and strayed from the core mission. They began using their subsidized financing to buy mortgage-backed securities which were backed by pools of mortgages that did not meet their usual standards. Over the last year, it became clear that their thin capital was not enough to cover the losses on these subprime mortgages." more

7. Two Cows: Text / Analogy
The Business Insider took the simplest route they could think to explain the AIG meltdown: describing it with a story of two cows.

"A third of the country goes vegetarian.

You thought your two cows were worth $200 and now they are worth $140." more

8. Don't But Stuff You Cannot Afford: Video
Still confused? Perhaps this book will help.

Bonus. Degrees of Hank Paulson: Visualization
This just came this morning from Stephen Anderson. A visualization of how U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is connected to the CEOs of the various banks.

Tell Your Friends: See What I Mean Workshops

2009-02-12T19:18:59Z

I'm speaking at two events in the next month. The first is VizThink, a conference on visual thinking. The talk there will be a short 90min hands-on session. The conference is fantastic and includes many experienced and talented visual thinkers. Register with the promotion code FCKC01 for $200 off the registration.

The other event is a more comprehensive full day workshop at the ASIS&T IA Summit 2009. However, there is also a strong possibility that this workshop will not happen if there are insufficient registrations. If you're interested in the workshop, I encourage you to look into registering before the early bird deadline which is this Friday!

My full day workshop covers a lot of the material that will be in the book in a very hands on manner. Here are some quotes from participants who have attended prior workshops:

"The most important thing I learned was that comics can be useful — seriously I need to get this into my official toolbelt of tools."

"There was a nice balance between theory and practice."

"He got everyone past the fear of drawing."

The technique is one being employed at companies like eBay and Google as well as agencies like nForm and Adaptive Path. Anna-Christina Douglas, Product Marketer for Google Chrome, said,

"[Comics] let us illustrate what was really happening with the technology in an abstract and digestible way. If we just had a white paper, very few people would have read it."

For those of you that have some concerns, here's a few common questions I get:

I don't know how to draw. The workshop teaches how to use tools or simple patterns to get ideas across. If you can draw a square, even an ill formed one, you've got all the pre-requisites you need.

I'm not a designer. As Google has illustrated, the medium is useful for marketing as well as design. In addition, product managers and engineers have found it to be a great tool for specifying the product's features at a high level.

I'd love to but I can't convince my manager. Comics are being used in organizations of all sizes because they save money and time. They get the point across quicker, they paint the big picture and most importantly, they help your team get on the same page early on so they're not building the wrong thing later.

I'm very excited about giving this workshop again but as I mentioned, this can only happen with your help. If you can't make it, do spread the word to those whom you think might enjoy such a workshop. Once again, register for the pre-conference workshop before the Friday early bird deadline!

In Plain English

2009-01-20T12:33:58Z

I've long been a fan of the couple at Common Craft. They make a series of videos called "In Plain English". In their own words:

"Our videos are short, simple and focused on making complex ideas easy to understand. We use a whiteboard-and-paper format we call Paperworks that is designed to cut out the noise and stick to what matters. "

I'm a frequent user of Twitter (you can add me @k) and found myself explaining the service to my dad recently. Instead of trying to explain the intricacies with a detailed email, I realized that "Twitter In Plain English" was the perfect solution:

I find it slightly ironic that their series is called "In Plain English" because it's the animations, the simple diagrams and the medium that does the bulk of the work of explaining concepts for them.

Common Craft has found a market for people who need complex ideas distilled to very digestible and understandable formats. Whether it's videos like theirs or creating a 6-panel comic strip, the hard part isn't even creating the document itself — it's in the rigor and skill needed to simplify the complex.

In See What I Mean, I will not only explain how to create the art for comics but also how to cut down to the essence of a message.

The Way We Work

2008-12-22T12:00:00Z

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Entertainment Gathering 2008, a conference founded and organized by TED founder Richard Saul Wurman.

One of the highlights of the conference was David Macaulay, the author of The Way Things Work and The Way We Work.

For those who are not familiar with his book, they are illustration masterpieces that explain difficult concepts with simple diagrams and analogies. At EG, David spoke about his 6-year long process of learning about the human anatomy and experimenting with various ways to explain the inner workings of the body.

Sometimes, his drawings looked like simplified anatomy diagrams found in biology books but often, he used unexpected styles and objects to convey his explanations. For one portion, he may elect to use pulleys and gears while elsewhere, he may use architectural drawings or even analogies to trampolines to get an idea across. The detail and range of his art shows the thoughtfulness that went into the production.

I also had the privilege of speaking with David about See What I Mean and his first response was a very encouraging, "it's about time!" If you're looking for some last minute gift ideas, I recommend you check out his latest book.

How to Draw a Car

2008-12-01T13:56:19Z

Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE and the VizThink conferences, is experimenting with teaching what he calls visual literacy. As part of that, he is trying to teach people how to express themselves visually and has a video about how to draw a simple car.

Dave is definitely part of the movement to revive the visual language and remind everyone that drawing is not a mystical art left to "artists" but instead, is a tool that we can all use.

Comic Review: Akoha

2008-10-23T11:10:11Z

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a few examples of companies using comics to convey an idea or product to their potential customers. One such company is the "social reality game" called Akoha. They use a short comic strip on their homepage as well as a longer story that describes their product in depth.

While this is a critique and will cover a number of negative points about the comic, I want to emphasize that even in its current form, it is much more understandable and likely to be read than any other marketing or product tour they might have used instead.

Akoha not only uses a comic for their product tour, they also feature a comic strip prominently on their homepage. It would be difficult for me to fault such a decision given my own application of the same for the company I work at. However, a couple of minor points could be improved upon.

Firstly, if you look at the screenshot, the first thing you probably read was the comic. It's easy to believe that introductory text should precede the comic but once viewed from afar, it's immediately evident that the comic strip is the first, and possibly only, thing a new visitor might read. If support copy is necessary, I'd recommend putting that underneath the comic instead so that it's read immediately following the end of the comic.

Secondly, in terms of the details of the comic, I think they use the right amount balance between detail and abstraction. Their cards aren't incredibly detailed so you don't focus on them. Instead, you're focused on the story flow which is much more important in this case. However, in the final panel, it didn't occur to me until I read the comic for the third time that it was not a depiction of the card but, in fact, an iPhone instead. One way to solve this confusion would have been to add more detail to the iPhone but instead, perhaps even just a zoomed-in view of a map would have sufficed. A map is easily recognizable by readers and most probably also know that maps can now be viewed on almost any device.

Lastly, the dialogue in the second panel is unclear in terms of what order the dialogue is being spoken. Further, the dialog itself is not very descriptive of what is happening. I think one could probably condense the first page or two of their product tour into a homepage 3-panel comic strip.

Based on what little I know about the company and their product, I might try a comic scripted liked this:

Panel 1
SCENE: TODD sitting with HARLENE at what is clearly a café.
CAPTION: Todd, a master Akoha player, buys Harlene a coffee.
HARLENE: Oh, what'd you do that for?

Panel 2
SCENE: EXTREME CLOSE UP of TODD's hand holding an AKOHA CARD. Only the title is visible.
CARD TITLE: Buy a friend a coffee
TODD (from off panel): I'm playing this Akoha pay-it-forward card.

Panel 3
SCENE: CLOSE UP of a map with lines and points like an Indiana Jones movie, perhaps with one or two UI elements to indicate it's a screen.
CAPTION: "You can see this card has traveled through 40 people ..."
LOWER CAPTION: "... and now I'm passing the card to you, Harlene!"

In another blog post, I'll talk a bit more about writing comic scripts and translating those to art. For now, I leave it up to you to visualize what this comic might look like and I will do a rough sketch of it in a later portion of the review.

If you're finding these reviews useful, please let me know in the comments. I'd also appreciate any suggestions for posts you'd like to see here as I develop more and more of the book!

Wordless Diagrams

2008-10-21T11:29:19Z

I recently moved apartments with my now fiancée Coley. In the process of unpacking, we discovered each others' book collections. While she was probably astonished at the sheer number of graphic novels I had, I was intrigued by many of her design and art books. In particular, one stood out to me as being both beautiful and yet relevant to the comic medium.

The book, Wordless Diagrams, is by Nigel Holmes who is the former Graphic Director of Time magazine. In the words of the synopsis:

Award-winning illustrator and graphic designer Nigel Holmes depicts the things we do every day like you've never seen them before.
Pruning a rose or building a sand castle might seem like a common activity, but when you see them visualized on paper in wordless, step-by-step diagrams, you'll discover them anew.

Imagine a LEGO or Ikea instruction manual mashed with a Survival handbook and you've got something close to this book. Comics are also known as sequential art and this book is a great example of how powerful sequential art alone can be.

Speaking at October's BayCHI

2008-10-11T21:59:19Z

If you live or happen to be in the Bay Area, you may be interested attending this month's BayCHI event where I will be speaking about the same topic the book covers. If you'd like a preview of the contents of the book, this presentation will hopefully give you some insight into that. If you plan on coming, feel free to come and ask me any questions afterwards.

I should also mention that this event is free! Hope to see you this Tuesday.

Point and Shoot

2008-09-25T19:20:46Z

Not all comics need to be elaborate 30+ pages. In fact, comics aren't even necessarily in well defined panels and may not contain any words. To use Will Eisner's nomenclature, comics are Sequential Art.

Ponoko's Photomake illustrates this brilliantly with the simplest comic possible:

Photomake lets you draw anything by hand, take a photo of it and turn those drawings into real life objects. They have a video next to the comic that explains the process in more detail but this little comic is so short and to the point that its simplicity also implies the product's own simplicity. It's as though they're saying, "No, really, it's that easy. Take a photo, and the next you know, your sketch is now real!"

See What I Mean Dot Org

2008-09-24T13:43:31Z

If you'd like to tell your friends about this book, and eventually related workshops, there's now a convenient url for you to link to: SeeWhatIMean.org currently links to this book site but will eventually host a schedule of upcoming workshops, templates, and other resources.

This blog will still be the place where discussions related to the book and previews of the content will be published so make sure you subscribe to the feed.

If you're a user of Twitter, you might also follow me. I'm simply k on twitter. However, I should point out that I don't only Twitter about updates on the book!

Comics In Use Everywhere!

2008-09-22T14:04:16Z

No doubt many of you have heard about the new browser from Google called Chrome. Some of you may have also heard about how Chrome’s features were explained: with a comic drawn by Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics.

Google’s use of comics is a tremendous validation for applying the medium to business contexts and in the spirit of, “it never rains but it pours,” a number of other business related comics have been cropping up lately on my radar. It seems the popularity of comics used not only for idea conception but also for marketing is increasing.

Akoha is an attempt at creating more in person interactions through a card game. The concept can be fairly confusing to communicate, so they chose to do so with a comic that tells the story between a few people.

Similarly, Dial "DIR-ECT-TIONS" uses a comic to quickly inform how their service works. The service is, in fact, quite simple. As its namesake implies, it tells you directions when you call the number. While Akoha needed to explain something quite complex to their visitors, this service had a 3 step process that could easily be explained in a few bullet points. Nevertheless, the comic form is much more entertaining and likely to get the idea across without any confusion.

Perhaps the most surprising example of comic usage I've seen recently is the U.S. Navy in Japan's usage of a full blown manga comic book, translated into both English and Japanese, created to promote and explain the arrival of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington to Japanese audiences.

Finally, I ate my own dog food recently by using a comic on the homepage of a product that I've been working on since the beginning of the year. Raptr, a social platform for people who like to play and discover games, is the company that I work for. Our previous homepage created a lot of confusion as to what our product did or how it differed from existing services. We saw a lot of misinformed comments that came from first impressions. In comparison, the comic marketed one of our product's core values in a much more concise and accurate fashion and the result has been a much more engaged audience who seem to more accurately understand the product.

Over the next few weeks, I'll look at some of these comics in use in the industry in more detail and talk about what I feel worked and didn't work with their implementation. I'll also discuss the process that we went through for the Raptr comic.

If you or your organization are using or trying to use comics, feel free to let me know and perhaps I can review them here on the blog. If it's possible and with permission, it may even become a part of the book!

Footnote: One thing to recognize is that all of these comics were created for marketing purposes and naturally required a bit more fidelity. As the book will explain in more detail, artistic ability is purely optional when it comes to using comics to get ideas across. You wouldn't necessarily want a stick figure on your homepage, but it will do the job in more situations than expected.

Why This Book?

2008-07-14T13:56:39Z

Looking at the history of how this book's idea and motivation came about, it's interesting to see how many of the milestones occurred at design conferences.

It all started at the 2005 CHI conference in Portland. Bill Buxton, author of "Sketching the User Experience" was in the midst of writing his book and contacted my OK/Cancel partner in crime Tom Chi and I about meeting up to chat with him at the conference. We met up and discussed various ideas surrounding his book as well as our particular medium of comics and how successful that was.

Then Bill offhandedly wondered how showing comics would compare to showing wireframes to stakeholders. He'd effectively planted a seed in my brain.

Months later, I joined Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Local. The design team and, in particular, our manager Tom Wailes were receptive to trying new methods and the idea of using comics to illustrate our next major set of features to stakeholders. With the help of Jane Jao and Shane Kibble, we created three sets of short comics that detailed the major use cases. They were instantly a hit all the way up to the VP of our organization. Mark Wehner, our team's user researcher, then brilliantly suggested what should have been obvious—that we show the comics to potential users. That was also a great success.

Fast forward a few months to IA Summit 2006. Lou Rosenfeld and I were already acquainted through some other work OK/Cancel had done for Lou and he was just getting Rosenfeld Media started and seeking authors. He suggested that perhaps the comics method would make a good addition but I was hesitant and uncertain of how much demand there would be for such a title. "I'm not sure it's enough for a book," I recall saying.

Jane and I presented our work with comics at the Summit to our largest audience yet which resulted in a great deal of positive feedback. But what I remember most was Lou coming up immediately after the talk and saying simply, "definitely a book."

And yet, I remained hesitant. Demand for the method's workshop was modest the following two years and the number didn't seem to be increasing. Many people were still encumbered with the notion that they needed to be able to draw to use the method and there was always the hurdle of overcoming the stigma of the word "comics".

Then, the momentum picked up. Martin Hardee, the director of user experience at Cisco.com, used the method and released comic templates to the public. Jess McMullin from nForm used comics as part of their swim lanes method. Boxes and Arrows had not one, but two articles on the use of comics. At the same time, many comic creation applications and websites were starting to appear.

As if to bring the tale full circle, the story ends with CHI and IA Summit. Further signifying the popularity of the method, the two most recent CHI conferences have included presentations on the use of comics to inform design. Then at the most recent IA Summit, Lou and I held an impromptu session soliciting ideas from interested readers and practitioners.

A large part of my uncertainty had been around the marketing of the book and the title. During this session, we received tremendous feedback from the participants about all aspects of the potential book but perhaps the most significant for me was Stephen Anderson's suggestion for the book title, "See What I Mean". It perfectly encapsulated what this book will be about.

I hope that session will only be the beginning of such quality feedback and advice from everyone. One of the great things about Rosenfeld Media is that the development of the book is such a collaborative process between the author and its audience. Throughout the next few months, I will be posting snippets, resources and most importantly, questions. I'm looking forward to it!