Category Archives: Ideas (blog)

bug babble.

Great Strides this weekend

Posted on by

So, last Sunday, my mom, basschica, and I walked in the breast cancer 5K in Philadelphia.

This Saturday, basschica and I are walking the Great Strides 10K in Valley Forge for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

You might be a little familiar with CF, because Cole (from the much neglected Night Fugues thread of comics) was born with it. It’s a terrible thing to inflict a person with, even a fictional one, but they say to write what you know. What I know is that my husband also has Cystic Fibrosis, along with CF-related diabetes.

I’m not going to wax poetic on the consequences. The quick version is that this is a life-shortening disease that screws up every cell in your body. The two most obvious results are extreme congestion of the lungs, and disruption of how your pancreas is supposed to work (resulting in an inability to break down food for digestion, and often diabetes.) If you want to read about the effects of CF, read this article (which is about the bell curve in medicine but gives a very good outline of how CF works). And then, of course, there’s The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation website, which has another ton of information.

Why Apple is more expensive than Amazon

Posted on by

Why Apple is more expensive than Amazon

At least, when it comes to buying DRM-free music.

This article sounds half-paranoid, but after the moronic track record that our “friends” in the music industry have subjected us to for many many years, I think it (sadly) makes logical sense.

And have you noticed that the music industry never steps forward to refute accusations like these?

What I need are magic needles

Posted on by

Dear JessieDog,

I know it’s been a while since I cleaned, and even longer since I really gave the bedroom a good going-over. Since you died, I’ve been avoiding throwing out your bed, and that kind of turned me off of straightening the rest of the room.

But it’s been three and a half months and the bedroom was starting to smell so bad you wouldn’t have wanted to sleep there, and that’s saying something. So tonight, I finally cleaned that room.

And I just gotta point out, mutt, that with the proper enchanted implements I could have knit you back to life using the furballs you left under the bed. Have you found a way to shed from Heaven?

love
anne

On comics, from two different angles

Posted on by

First, I think I might have actually found a way around the now-infamous elevator comic that has stalled Night Fugues for months.

Second, I spent a significant amount of time today harassing my fellow Information Architects about a Boxes and Arrows podcast that implied there was a difference between storyboards and comics, at least as far as the artifacts of the design process are concerned. Since I’m coming from the comic side of that dichotomy I thought it would be important to know the difference between a “design” comic and a “normal” comic, especially since I thought storyboards were comics. A storyboard is a piece of sequential art that expresses design and behavior of a system through a story that provides insight into the user’s mental/emotional state, which pretty much defines “comic” , so what the heck?

A conversation with my mentor led me to a conversation with another excellent IA, which led me to a printout of a presentation from this year’s IA Summit discussing how you could use a comic instead of a storyboard to present design ideas. That presentation was done by Kevin Cheng one of the creators of OK/Cancel, a design-oriented webcomic I’ve been reading for years, and it recommended the same books for writing comics to express design that I own in order to improve my comic production skills — Will Eisner and Scott McCloud and company.

So, having read the presentation and worked with storyboards for design (even though I’m not first-hand familiar with either one from start to finish) I’m willing to take the chance and summarize the difference between a storyboard and a comic when it comes to design.

Storyboards are comics by the definition of any comic author anywhere. But in storyboards, the panels generally concentrate on the screens and their functionality, business and user goals, and similar sawdust-flavored information.

A comic (as stated above) is is a piece of sequential art that expresses something through the act of telling a story. A comic (like any piece of fiction and some nonfiction) is generally showing the growth of the main character through their interaction with other characters, their environment, or themselves. A comic visually provides insight into the user’s mental/emotional state as well as that interaction with their surroundings.

A design comic (which is where we use the comic to express the design of a piece of software) keeps the same character focus that we find in standard comic strips and comic books. It uses sequential art to express high level design ideas (probably pre-wireframes) to add clarity to the growing user scenarios and situations, and share the user’s growth through the
story.

Or to sum up really quick and easy, storyboards are a) more likely to be higher fidelity detailed designs or wireframes, b) more likely to express business goals and user goals in the margins instead of in the comic, and c) really really boring to read.

*Updated 4/24 at 7:12 am when I not trying to type on the iPhone while falling asleep, and thus could correctly link and close tags.

And back we go….

Posted on by

My kid sister (basschica) managed to bathe her Macbook in iced tea Friday. As a result, we’re back at the Apple Store today.

Let me just say that the Genius Bar and the way they handle it is the most awesome support mechanism I’ve ever seen. But the kid just got called up, so I’ll post more later.