May 1, 2014
Comic Strip – Why you shouldn’t mail *.doc files
This is another project I started about two and a half years ago, but never got around to properly finish. The idea came about when encountering some of the annoying things which some people on the internet do: forwarding chain-mails or mailing *.doc files, for example.
It is oftentimes not that well taken when answering such mails with an — even friendly meant — explanation why such a behavior is annoying. So the idea of drawing a comic which explains the issue in a brief and funny way came about. Everybody likes comic strips, right?
So instead of replying such *.doc mails with a textual explanation it would be more practical (and probably the sender would take it better) to link a comic strip.
At the time I talked to Kate and she made some sketches for such a strip which I then proceeded to scan. I never got around to digitize them properly and build an illustration from them. But I have done so now:
(click on image or here to enlarge)
The illustration has been created in DIN A1, click here to get the large (114 MB) PDF. The raw photoshop file is available here (58 MB) as well. If you want to mail the link to someone you could use this one:
http://micha.elmueller.net/doc-comic/comic.png
(1280x904px, 515 KB)All files are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0).
There are a lot of very well written texts explaining in detail why sending Microsoft Word *.doc files is not good practice. I like these two the best:
- Please don’t send me Microsoft Word documents (Tristan Miller)
- We Can Put an End to Word Attachments (Richard Stallman)
The original idea included creating a series from the comic. I’ll see if I get around to do that. If you have any ideas for fitting topics in such a series, please feel free to comment this post or mail me.