After struggling to come up with an engaging way to present the "Road to HUA" in a comic, I decided to brainstorm a completely new idea. With the deadline approaching rapidly, this was a risky move, but I wanted something that would be very eye catching and intriguing to first year students to learn about the humanities requirement. After sketching a few different ideas, it finally clicked: memes. Students spend an average of 24 hours per day looking at memes, so this was the perfect way to communicate important information to them. I spent a lot of time outlining this new comic idea and along the way I chose memes that would entertain students as they read how to complete their HUA requirement through depth and breadth, as well as why it is so important and valuable to their experience at WPI. Here are some of my sketches and brainstorming ideas:
After sketching out the comic, I decided to create it using powerpoint:
After sketching out the comic, I decided to create it using powerpoint:
The combination of stick figures with meme images creates an engaging look to the comic but also keeps it simple and easy to read and follow. I will continue adding a few more elements to give the comic its final touches, but I've had a few of my peers read it and they found it both funny and informative.
I do think that the memes and stick figures engage the audience effectively, but I'm not sure how well the blocks of text in some of the speech bubbles maintain the audience's interest. I'd suggest increasing the number of slides that way you can prevent walls of text from interrupting the flow of the reading. Also, as someone familiar with memes, there's a culture of internet persons that scoff at the usage of memes in non memey contexts, especialllly if they don't use them correctly. Right now, the only meme that is out of place is the brain "transcendence" meme, as it needs more text to go with its accepted format.
ReplyDeleteI'd suggest taking a look at knowyourmeme.com , I would have suggested this earlier had I not been buried in Adobe Illustrator in my laptop.
But the meme format has a lot of potential! I personally love the worldview meme, I haven't seen it before and it's objectively funny, but yeah shoring up on some of the meme formats would be a good idea in my opinion. I'm excited to see how your final product looks!
Thanks for your input! I'm definitely not a meme expert, although I definitely enjoy them and sending them to friends. One of the reasons why I like them too is because there aren't really rules - I even made some of my own memes in this comic (the world view meme being one of them)! I'll definitely check out knowyourmeme.com to expand on my knowledge of memes:)
Delete