Day 0 : How it started
It was a fine day when I was waiting for my friends (Sagar, Vaibhav & Ankur) in a cafe in Connaught Place, New Delhi.
I don't clearly remember if they were late or I was early, but I happened to have my iPad (luckily) & a funny-looking fellow with a long nose sitting in front of me.
I just couldn't resist & started making an illustration of him.
Things picked up & I started to make different versions of him like he was an NFT. Probably because I had more time and nothing else to do.
When I was a kid, I always wanted to make a comic book & now I just saw a chance to get this executed. And the rest is history…
I don't want it to be a headache
Don’t misunderstand me, I love making these comics but let’s take a moment to realize that I’m not a full-time comic artist.
I’m a Product Designer and I make my living from doing that full time, so when do I take time to make these comics?
During weekends !! Yes !! But I don’t want to spend most of the time making comics, I luckily have friends and family to chill with.
So what do I do about it?
Simple !! I make a design system for it like I did at my workplace. A simple and functional Comic Design System in Figma using components saves me a lot of time. Even being a former actuarial professional doesn't help in calculating the increase in efficiency because of this.
Decide the characters & prepare a rough sketch
The idea was to decide a base body, build characters, storyline or a theme to go ahead with. I did this on my iPad.
Create expressions over a body base to give it some character. People usually have a perception about someone based how they look, let’s use that.
"Components"
This feature is a life saver. I don’t want any fancy comics with great art. The idea is to make the readers laugh and I don’t think I need killer art to do that. A funny conversation-based comic should do that for me.
This creates character templates to use later, instead making them from scratch each time.
Now use a body base and prepare characteristics using the pen tool on a standardised character frame. This ensures that your characters are of same size every time and all the overlay characteristics are consistent.
Now it’s just the game of drag & drop :) Note that due to components it’s easy for me to change expressions via panel.
Auto-layout
Auto-layout is important because you don’t want to adjust your comic frame’s border every time you make an alteration or adjustment of a grid & most importantly you want your dialogue box to adjust according to the dialogue length & height. It’s a terrible headache to keep a check on each dialogue box’s padding.
Let me show you how it works ;]
Check out the witty bunch of comics
Teeny tiny comic strips which are relatable and should urge you to share it with your co-workers.
I'm up for some laugh
We frequently do a lot of giveaways and collaborate within design community
Explore
