I've done workshops on everything from teaching web animation to developers to teaching JavaScript to designers, and after every event, I hear, "I wish I could draw like you! Your comics and storytelling are so easy to understand." So here it is, a course where I reveal all the secrets to visual communication that I learned in my seven years as an award winning cartoonist!
Most everyone can benefit from improving their communication skills. Do you:
Then you're going to get a lot from this course. Most visual communication involves an element of storytelling, and in this course, I show you how comics principles apply to every day communication and design challenges, from getting the audience to empathize with characters to hooking them with a narrative arc to explain your conclusion.
It's an intense, fun course that will improve your emotional communication, composition skills, and storytelling chops.
Watch videos, draw art, post your work, get feedback. If you spend about 2-4 hours a week on this course, you'll finish in about a month. Or you could run through the whole thing in a dedicated work week!
You can start at any time after you enroll. I will personally give you feedback when you post work in the assignments areas.
I'm a web animation expert and consultant. I've given workshops at companies and conferences in eight different countries; write about web animations and UI animation for publications such as A List Apart, Net Mag, and Adobe Inspire; and keynote conferences including O’Reilly’s OSCON. I love the web animation community and advocate for it as an invited expert at the W3C.
If you'd like to get more involved, check out my newsletter WebAnimationWeekly.com and join us at the Animation at Work Slack community . You can also find me on Twitter and at rachelnabors.com.
I had been following Rachel on social media since I came across her Alice in Videoland piece. I really enjoy her work and style, so I was thrilled when I saw the announcement for a cartooning course with Rachel. I was not disappointed—the video lessons were informative and fun, and we all got valuable personal feedback on our work directly from Rachel. I look forward to more classes with her to help deepen my art skills. — Ana Ulin, software engineer
In only a couple of weeks this course developed my drawing and designing skills A LOT. Also Rachel is a great teacher who will guide you through the course with humor, warmth and a lot of knowledge! — Maria Annas, interaction design student
Fun, knowledgeable, interactive, eager to help- these are just some of the things I could say about Rachel's teaching style. She has the rare ability to take material that is beyond second nature to herself and break it down into its smallest parts so that it's easy for a beginner to understand. Her courses are highly visual and engaging. 'Cartooning for Technical Folk' was not only fun, but practical as well. I learned that I can draw! Not only that, but I can use drawing in my daily life as a professional to enhance my workflow and communications with others. 10 out of 10! — Sarah Khan, UX designer
Practical Cartooning is a goody bag for aspiring cartoonists, sprinkled with Rachel's warmth and humour. Highly recommended!— Robert Blixt, web developer
I loved the process of "storifying" a technical concept and making it more accessible.— Amber Himes Matz, educator with Drupalize.Me at Lullabot
