|
Welcome to the seventeenth issue of The Featured Image newsletter, a place where writing meets art. As a reminder, the goal here is to add visual creativity to our work and gain inspiration from those already doing it.
...
If you want to be a full-blown illustrator, there’s really no getting around the fact that you need some pretty serious artistic skills. But if you’re simply looking to communicate an idea using visuals, all bets are off. Stick figures and thought bubbles will do just fine.
Just look at Randall Munroe.
He created the wildly popular xkcd webcomic, which has a style that can’t get much more simple.
|
|
Anyone can draw stick figures, but nobody else could create xkcd. That’s because the secret sauce is in the ideas. The drawings are just a vehicle, not the destination.
The existence and popularity of xkcd is a great reminder that it is perfectly possible to resonate with an audience with only the artistic capacity to draw stick figures!
My real appreciation of Munroe’s work though is with his explanatory nonfiction writing. He has this great longer form style of explaining fascinating and complex ideas in a simple way, all with the aid of drawings of course.
Here is an example from his what if? book, where he is walking through the fun scenario of what would happen if a baseball was thrown at 90% the speed of light.
|
|
His “Good Point” column for The New York Times is another example of his longer form style. I think there is room in the world for a lot more of this type of content. We need more writers who draw!
In fact, I hold up Munroe as one of the best “writers who draw”. He writes well and includes drawings in almost everything he does. I can’t imagine reading something from him that doesn’t have some drawings to go with it. It’s almost as if his writing style inherently includes visuals.
To give Munroe some artistic credit, not everything he does involves simple drawings. He has some serious talent in making intricate diagrams and posters.
Here’s just one example from Thing Explainer, which is completely full of pages like this.
|
|
|
|
The funny language is because Munroe is articially constraining himself to only using the 1,000 more popular words in this book.
|
|
And because with this project I have been very interested in the tools creators use, of course I wanted to find what I could about the tools Munroe uses. It was surprisingly hard!
At least as of 2008, he goes old school and uses pen and paper and scans in his drawings (I couldn’t find anything more recent that says he has changed his habits). I imagine he uses more digital tools than normal for his detailed diagrams, but for xkcd and his typical writings, I wouldn't be surprised if nothing has changed.
Munroe's biggest gift to aspiring visual creators is to show that the only limit is your creativity, not your technical artistic skills.
|
|
A few years ago I wrote an article about an episode of Radiolab where I snuck in a few visuals. I very much had Randall Munroe on my mind while putting this together, even if I cringe a bit now at how the visuals look!
This is a pretty motivating read about being less precious with your sketch book.
Famed children's author Eric Carle died last week, and I never knew he was born in my current hometown of Syracuse, NY. One local art teacher helped bring out the color in his creativity. So much so that it survived a very unhappy and gray time after moving to Germany.
One of my favorite visual newsletters is Drawing Links by Edith Zimmerman. She was just featured in Uses This, which is all about the tools creators use (and an influence on this newsletter).
A Reddit thread of people's favorite xkcd comics.
|
|
Twitter | Sign up for newsletter
Ok, that's it for this week. Be sure to create something cool and share it with someone.
Erik
|
|
|
|
