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About Kevin Cheng

See What I Mean

How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas

By Kevin Cheng

Published: December 2012

Paperback: 216 pages

Paperback ISBN: 978-1933820-27-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1933820-85-9

If you’re an executive, designer, product manager, marketer, or engineer, communication is part of your work. Using images and text in unique ways, comics can engage readers in ways traditional methods can’t. In See What I Mean, you’ll learn how to create comics about your products and processes without an illustrator—just like Google, eBay, and Adobe do.

Testimonials

Think you can’t draw? Wish you could? Want to make your personas and scenarios and user stories much more vivid with pictures? Now you can! Get this book! Kevin Cheng shows and tells us why comics are a wonderful way to convey the stories of our designs. And he makes it easy for even the drawing-challenged (like me) to do it.

Janice (Ginny) Redish, ?author, Letting Go of the Words-Writing Web Content that Works (2nd ed., 2012)

Even if you are a product manager, in marketing, or engineering manager, who has no aspirations to learn to cartoon, this book may be even more important to you, since your job may well be all the more about effective communication. This will help build priceless literacy in what could be an effective arrow in your quiver of techniques.

Bill Buxton, author of Sketching the User Experience

We’ve used sketching and storyboards at Twitter to help us understand the problems we are trying to solve, collaboratively iterate on product concepts, and communicate the core of an idea clearly and concisely. Kevin’s book is a great resource for designers looking to incorporate storytelling into their workflow.

Joshua Brewer, Principal Designer at Twitter

A breakthrough book by Kevin Cheng that will soon have you making breakthroughs of your own. If you care about clear thinking and communication, this book belongs in your library.

Dave Gray, author of Gamestorming and The Connected Company

Think you can’t draw? Wish you could? Want to make your personas and scenarios and user stories much more vivid with pictures? Now you can! Get this book! Kevin Cheng shows and tells us why comics are a wonderful way to convey the stories of our designs. And he makes it easy for even the drawing-challenged (like me) to do it.

Janice (Ginny) Redish, ?author, Letting Go of the Words-Writing Web Content that Works (2nd ed., 2012)

Even if you are a product manager, in marketing, or engineering manager, who has no aspirations to learn to cartoon, this book may be even more important to you, since your job may well be all the more about effective communication. This will help build priceless literacy in what could be an effective arrow in your quiver of techniques.

Bill Buxton, author of Sketching the User Experience

We’ve used sketching and storyboards at Twitter to help us understand the problems we are trying to solve, collaboratively iterate on product concepts, and communicate the core of an idea clearly and concisely. Kevin’s book is a great resource for designers looking to incorporate storytelling into their workflow.

Joshua Brewer, Principal Designer at Twitter

Think you can’t draw? Wish you could? Want to make your personas and scenarios and user stories much more vivid with pictures? Now you can! Get this book! Kevin Cheng shows and tells us why comics are a wonderful way to convey the stories of our designs. And he makes it easy for even the drawing-challenged (like me) to do it.

Janice (Ginny) Redish, ?author, Letting Go of the Words-Writing Web Content that Works (2nd ed., 2012)

Even if you are a product manager, in marketing, or engineering manager, who has no aspirations to learn to cartoon, this book may be even more important to you, since your job may well be all the more about effective communication. This will help build priceless literacy in what could be an effective arrow in your quiver of techniques.

Bill Buxton, author of Sketching the User Experience

We’ve used sketching and storyboards at Twitter to help us understand the problems we are trying to solve, collaboratively iterate on product concepts, and communicate the core of an idea clearly and concisely. Kevin’s book is a great resource for designers looking to incorporate storytelling into their workflow.

Joshua Brewer, Principal Designer at Twitter

Chapter 1: Comics Save Time
Chapter 2: Properties of Comics
Chapter 3: Basic Drawing
Chapter 4: What’s Your Comic About?
Chapter 5: Writing the Story
Chapter 6: Laying Out the Comic
Chapter 7: Drawing Comics
Chapter 8: Applying Comics
Chapter 9: Breaking Down the Barriers
Chapter 10: Onward

FAQ

These common questions about comics and their short answers are taken from Kevin Cheng’s book See What I Mean: Using Comics to Communicate Ideas. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

What tools do I need?
To create a comic, you need a piece of paper and a pencil—nothing more. However, you do need to define a few things up front such as whom you’re making the comic for and what you’re trying to get your readers to do. Are you trying to get everyone on the same page? Get customers to sign up for your site? Communicate an internal process to your team? Educate someone on a topic? In addition to answering these questions, it will be helpful to know something about your characters through research and personas.
Chapter 4 discusses these questions, while Chapter 7 covers a lot of the tools you can use.