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April 20th, 2005

How to be taken seriously as a cartoonist

you are hereI went to the Design Museum yesterday. It was worthwhile, though not spectacular.

At the moment I’m looking for inspiration regarding design for CartoonChurch.com, both the website and my business as a whole. And yes, I am fully aware that with only a few weeks to launch I should have got that sorted out ages ago. One thing I noticed at the Design Museum and have observed at numerous other modern art galleries is that very clean lines and sans serif fonts seem to be the standard as far as designing signage and logos go. Yes, I know there are exceptions to this, but as a general rule of thumb it seems to be the case.

It’s not easy to see how my handwritten, slightly haphazard look fits in with this very clean-lined ‘prefessional-looking’ approach. The header on the cartoon blog is a first attempt to be going on with, but it’s not the finished article by any means. The difficulty with a cartooning business is that one needs to be taken seriously, but doesn’t want to be taken too… seriously.

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5 Responses to “How to be taken seriously as a cartoonist”


  1. Dave K says:

    Hi,
    Helvetica Neue seems to be quite popular with galleries/exhibition spaces, airports and trendy Soho hairdressers too. I think Douglas Coupland described it as “the non-personality typeface”.

    Dave.

    April 21st, 2005 at 8:58 pm
  2. Unordered says:

    I really like the look of the website, clean bold fonts especially. I wouldn’t like to see those fonts on your cartoons. I really like the look of your handwritten scriblings, like on your summary of the windsor report here. It’s just wouldn’t be as funny with nice fonts. http://www.wibsite.com/features/windsorreport/

    April 22nd, 2005 at 12:23 am
  3. Dave says:

    Dave, people either seem to rave about Helvetica or say you really shouldn’t use it. I haven’t quite worked it out. Then there’s the other people who say Helvetica is brilliant, Arial is rubbish.

    Unordered – thank you for the thoughts. The font / scribbling question appies most to the design of things like my business cards / notepaper / exhibition stand / website header. I think for cartoons I am going to stick with handwritten.

    For font enthusiasts out there, the font in the header is Arial Black. Its deeply unfashionable, but the boldest font I’ve found that just about everyone has on their computer.

    April 22nd, 2005 at 1:01 am
  4. chalky says:

    have you got ‘the art of looking sideways’ by alan fletcher? I’ve almost certainly told you about it before. I’m fairly certain you would have dug it out yourself anyway. You would certainly like it.

    April 28th, 2005 at 9:04 am
  5. Dave says:

    Chalky – I have indeed. And yes, it was your recommendation which alerted me to it a year or two ago.

    April 28th, 2005 at 3:22 pm