Another "Style" Thread - minimalist graphics/cartoon

[DavidAnderson]

Another great example of minimalism in storytelling is the Dot and the Line: YouTube - The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics and the Wikipedia entry: The Dot and the Line - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[GerryWaz]

Gotta believe the novelty of this and the infrequent use often makes it memorable. Use it too often and an audience might get bored.

Also knowing your audience helps. I know some folks here that whenever I do a partial person on a slide, seemingly floating in space with no ground underneath them, often feel troubled by that.

Also, I work for a company with a lot of scientists and engineers and a strong technical culture. Normally we avoid anything "cute-sy" with them. Wish it wasn't so but "that's the facts, Jack."

[BrucUK]

Love "Stick Guy" concept
Gerry - agree with the concept of "audience-specific examples" completely. Perhaps the "cutesy" examples could be kept for introducing exercises etc.?
Bruce

[elearningart]

These are the posts that get me inspired and totally off track (in a good way). It's always amazing how something as simple as a ball or a stick figure can actually convey meaning really well.

Funny story...about 6 months ago, I hired an aspiring fashion designer to create sock puppets for me (somewhat overqualified- ha). I thought that it would be fun to create a few different sock puppet characters to use in e-Learning scenarios. We got part-way through the project, but had to pull the plug when the prototype took like 5x longer than planned. Haha. Oh well. I still had fun.

Ok. I'm inspired now. I'm going to have my guys create some new simple, random, character theme. I'll post what we come up with here. Stay tuned.

[pablohunny]

I love it! Now I just have to choose between working and deciding how many edges my new best friend should have

-A-

[elearningart]

Ok. I decided to go the stick figure route. This is the rough concept. Please don't make fun of my drawings!!! LOL. If I were to do this for a project, I'd probably spend more time polishing it up, but here you go as is...

1. Create a few different stick figure characters that could be used in a scenario
2. Create a whole series of emotions by changing facial expressions (I've just done a few here)
3. Create a wide range of body positions (I've just done a few samples)
4. Mix and match heads and bodies to create characters
5. Create scenes with your characters

Just so everyone knows the tools, I only used powerpoint and the trackpad on my laptop. On the drawing toolbar I used "scribble."

This is something that's easy to do on your own and I think it could be an effective way to build a scenario. Let me know what you think!

[doofdaddy]

I'm with Gerry on the novelty. The effect is lost quickly. As far as build and swap characters, odds are that most people would prefer pre-built characters over having to assemble them.

Never mind - I was thinking something else.

[doofdaddy]

Just remembered that I did a post on stick figures a while back.
Little Known Ways to Create Your Own Graphics Using PowerPoint The Rapid eLearning Blog

It's brilliant stuff.