December 28th, 2008
Comics for Serious Business
The Dutch design firm Qua recently made a comic book for PON Holdings. Much as graphic novels do, this comic book uses pictures, dialogue, and captions to convey serious information: it’s a strategy manual for PON’s employees. About their choice of medium, Qua writes, “The ‘comic’ had to have a business-look with recognizable people and products.” The company succeeded — but that didn’t stop the comic from relying on classic comic tricks, like speech bubbles holding nothing but punctuation marks.
Is this the end of business literacy? The end of verbal communication? Hardly. Most of us would be better writers if we had to fit high-level business information into tiny comic frames.