What does it take to create a FontAwesome equivalent for comics?

We love comics. We badly wanted to create comic strips. But there was one problem. Some of us can’t draw a straight line for nuts. But we wanted to express our data visualizations by evoking emotions – in the form of comics. So we created a JavaScript utility for that instead.

• How we broke down comic characters into structured components (and how you can break down arbitrary images similarly in JS)
• How to draw and compose these images using data
• How to handle problems with static content and async loaoding on CDNs

Intended audience:

• JS developers who want to include comics in their pages
• JS developers who want to understand gotchas in library packaging

Outline

Why do we need to bother with comics?

How can we control comic content using data analysis

How we built a library to automate this

Requirements

None

Speaker bio

Anand is a co-founder of Gramener, a company that narrates insights as data stories.

Anand is design-impaired. So he had to automate designs to make them work. He’s also artistically impaired, and therefore has to automate comics to draw them

Links

• Link to slides for this talk: https://www.slideshare.net/gramener/generating-comics-with-javascript
• JSFoo 2013: Beautiful Visualizations using D3 - https://youtu.be/JAlZ0uJnqkA
• JSFoo 2012: Data Visualization in JS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ixB2NVbCpI
• Scraping the Government with JS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH4E0PEyx3I