Up your nose

Visual communication and COVID-19

A design colleague working with kids in mandatory quarantine asked for suggestions as to ways to gamify the process of giving children coronavirus nasal swab tests, preferably using paper (as it’s disposable). This was my first thought.

If you’d like to use it with kids yourself but don’t draw, .

Then print to both sides of the paper and pop a little hole where the nostril is.

If you use it, .

When the pandemic kicked off, annoyed by the lack of useful government communications, I did a “volunteer” explainer for my local MP to use.

It was useful as of March 26; I don’t think the basic info has changed much since then. This, also, is .

There are plenty of people . It’s been part of my own freelance work in the last few months.

As the writers of the afore-linked paper say,

Public health bodies, governments, and media outlets have turned to comics in this time of need and found a natural and capable medium for responding to the challenge. Comics have been used as a vehicle to present science in graphic narratives, harnessing the power of visuals, text, and storytelling in an engaging format.

Simultaneously, of course, , and continues to kneecap organisations that give young artists a chance to build their skills, from to and .

Meanwhile,they are , . And state governments are having a nice time . Because “arty types” don’t know what’s good for communities.

There’s a larger rant to be had about this but I’ll leave it there for now. Keep well.

David Blumenstein is a service designer and visual communicator. There are no Drawing for Story workshops being held currently as, when his city is not under government lockdown, David is hiding under his bed “doing his bit” for the community. Students of ’s UX and Service Design courses will catch him teaching “narrative visualisation” in the Zoom classroom, though.

David’s most recent comics story is , at The Guardian.

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David works in service/strategic design: experienceillustration.com. He draws comics at Squishface Studio: squishfacestudio.com. Other stuff: nakedfella.com.

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