Our Comic Inspiration
Our comic inspiration comes from many sources, often construction drawings errors or omissions, typos in project manuals and specs or sometimes even from our own team.
Often humor is used in our office to give us a chance to release a little stress by laughing at ourselves or it can easily turn a difficult situation with a particular drawing into something more positive and productive.
Where do you get your cartoon ideas?
Quite often our cartoon ideas begin with an error discovered by the review team, but it evolves quite extensively from there.
How do the cartoons develop?
Most often a cartoon is not an exact representation of an error, but is more likely an imaginative twist on a real error. For example, we may run across an error in the drawings and wonder what the building or room would look like if it was built according to the drawings (of course this would rarely happen, since the contractor or someone will likely catch it and send out an RFI before they get that far). So often the cartoons reflect the what ifs. What if it was built like that, how would the room elements work? How would it integrate into the rest of the building and so on. And of course we discuss our ideas with the artist and it takes another evolutionary step from there.
Do you ever worry about offending someone with a cartoon?
Of course, we cannot anticipate how everyone will feel about a cartoon, but we try to create cartoons that are more mild than what you might see in the general media. We also never use identifying information, such as Architecture firm names, project names, building names or anything else that would directly connect a cartoon to an actual set of drawings. Plus as mentioned above, often we exercise a bit of creative licensing with the cartoon to even further distance it from an actual construction drawing.
How often do you publish new cartoons?
We try to publish at least one new cartoon per month, but there may be some months were we publish more than that.