Business Cartoon (and a story about a job gone very well)
July 06, 2019
I get a lot of jobs like these and they are largely forgettable in their corporate generic-ness. But let me tell you why I'll always remember this one, and fondly.
For once, the client blew me away (rather than the other way around.)
At the outset, I received a script that was far too wordy to fit into a comic in any legible way. I gave my usual recommendation to cull the word count by half. This instruction is almost always disregarded, so imagine my surprise when he came back with a second draft that was 30% of the original word count!
And let me tell you- content-wise, nothing was lost. It was just as informative, except now it was clear and concise whereas before, you really had to work to read it.
I'm a designer and an ardent reader. I know all too well how the eye and brain work together, and how they fight. The eye will absolutely skip over large blocks of text. If you want your content to be read, you need to break it up into easily digestible chunks.
Don't be precious about every single detail. The best writers use the fewest words to convey the most information.
And listen to your designer. Heed the advice of other experts. Far too often, I see clients get in their own way, to the detriment of the end product.
This was one instance where I had the absolute pleasure of working with someone who smartly followed good advice, and the end product was much stronger because of it!
