The project was to design a comic that tells a story. My teammates and I, after running through several ideas, decided to do a satirical comic on the perception of life in the UAE by outsiders. Personally, I have been asked some strange questions about how people live in the UAE from friends, family and relatives back home. Upon discussion, Luize told us that she had such experiences too. Mai, on the other hand, is Emirati, and has been asked these questions in her travels abroad. The three of us felt that this could be common theme that most of us here at NYUAD could relate to. We decided to paint a sarcastic picture of life in the UAE by over exaggerating some of the stereotypical preconceptions that people have.
The idea was to then create the comic as a conversation between two characters - a local from the UAE, and an outsider who has never heard of life in the UAE before. The outsider asks the local some questions about the UAE, to which the local paints over-exaggerated pictures of the the stereotypes that we have come to know.
In terms of the layout of the comic, we wanted to create a feeling of relatability towards the characters themselves. This can be seen in the manner in which we place the characters outside the actual ‘box’ or ‘panel’ of the comic. One could argue that the characters are also looking the the boxes with the reader. The boxes, or panels represent situations in the UAE. Each panel represents a different stereotype, which is preceded by a question from the outsider and is succeeded by an explanation by a local. The panel is a representation of this explanation.
In the final comic, we see the characters jumping into the panel and the panel there represents more of the reality of life in the UAE. The idea here was to show the stark contrast between reality and the stereotypes.
The implementation had 2 parts - creating the comics, and putting them together on the website. Each element in the comic adds to the theme and has its own unique contribution to the overall theme. The entire comic was designed by us on illustrator and photoshop. We were fortunate enough to get to use the Microsoft Surface Studios in the Design Lab which had surface pens so we could draw on the screen. Drawing is definitely not my forte, yet I still drew and colored one panel! Apart from that, I researched on the actual website and I created the index, home and about pages. I wrote the core js that would create the movement of the comics using third party libraries. Mai surprised us with her amazing artistic abilities and she took the responsibility of drawing the each of the cute characters by hand. She also made a panel. Luize made a lot of the panels and helped out with website styling - background colors, fonts, gradients, and the like.
Reflection: The comics themselves came out wonderful. All of us think that we did a particularly good job designing all the comics, especially since we did each of them from scratch. The website also looks nice and is simple to navigate. I strongly believe that our comic does a very good job of representing the original theme that we had decided upon. All the elements are there and we showed it to a couple of friends who were all able to relate to the theme that we were trying to address. The comics took way more effort than we had anticipated, but the effort paid off. The only thing I feel a lack of is a little more interactivity. We struggled to think of ways to incorporate more interactivity into the website, but we decided to keep the comic as the main focus. The little navigator below also helps to add a nice feel to the webpage. We did some user-testing and got very useful feedback about how it was not obvious which comic the navigation slider pointed to, after which we added the number of the comic on to the tiny image. Other feedback was that the dots could be placed between the images rather than below the navigation slider.
Overall, making the comic was a fun experience!