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1/ Rereading "Chatting with Glue" piece this morning. Still a classic. Wish there were way more visual-spatial essays around the web. I think we get hung up on calling them "comics." Comics are a distinct visual culture people believe requires drawing skills
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๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ can we augment our online chats with new affordances? ๐Ÿง  what does a conversational medium that supports *thinking* look like? ๐Ÿ”€ Is there a pathway from the linear, one-dimensional, immutable logs we call "online conversation"? I made a comic! a9.io/glue-comic/
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2/ "Comics" come with presumptions about how they 'should' be formatted โ€“ panels, word bubbles, superhero action shots Scott McCloud made a great case for broadening the medium in 'Understanding Comics'. But still feels trapped in historical legacy and established practices
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I somehow missed this piece up to now - the format and content are both amazing! I agree - this is more than comic and visual essay gets closer to what I feel while reading it. Naming things is hard not least of all because we can feel restrained by the box that name creates.
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Well... I definitely think some form of graphics skill is needed, which not all people have - some are much more comfortable just writing. Having said that, I fully agree this form of expression needs more love - and more practitioners....
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... me, for example, I get extremely bored with videos. But I just love this kind of 'extended info-graphics' that,when well done, have so much packed information on it - it gets way less boring than reading a wall of text.
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Yes, my notion of โ€œvisual languageโ€ originally emerged from recognizing that โ€œcomicsโ€ and โ€œjuxtaposed imagesโ€ are actually NOT the same thing, which was liberating for using the latter beyond the stereotypes of the former
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Oh yes, absolutely love their work. They're the gold standard of experimental visual stories on the web. I'm not necessarily into the quant data visualisation side of things, but love the way they design stories around the data.
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