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Creating cartoon-style representations of things using comics and animation can be a great way to communicate complex concepts, tell stories, and present information in a visual, engaging way. We'll explore digital tools that can help you to create comics and animated videos and GIFs.
To put it simply, comics are pictures in a deliberate sequence. They are usually intended to convey some kind of information, story, or response in the viewer. Will Eisner called them "sequential art". Comics might be entirely made of pictures, but usually they also contain some amount of text, whether that is speech, sound effects, or text in the picture like labels or signs.
Comics can be found everywhere, from instructional manuals to graphic novels. Even if we don't read comics specifically, most people have some familiarity with their structure and how to read a comic's images in a sequence.
You put together pictures! However, there are digital tools that can make it easier to make comics. You might want to use a tool that can give you a panel structure, as most comics use that kind of structure. You might want to source images you can use rather than drawing your own. And you might need to edit images to get exactly what you want.
You need to plan your comic, too. You need to plot out the story or message of the comic and the timing of telling it. You might do this by writing out in words what the story is, and then what each panel will contain. A spreadsheet can be a useful structure for doing this if you're doing it digitally. You should also consider the artistic side of your comic: what kind of visual style are you using and how will your comic be visually laid out of the page?
You can make a comic in almost any digital tool that allows you to add or create images. Even, if you really had to, a text processing tool like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. However, some tools have specific features that you might find useful for creating comics. Let's take a look at a few suggestions:
You can use PowerPoint for a whole range of things that aren't creating presentations, from designing posters to creating videos. As it can be used to create graphics and posters, it can also be used to create comics. There's plenty of features for inserting and editing images and shapes (including cropping images as a particular shape) and you can even use the Draw tab in PowerPoint to draw your own pictures. There's also plenty of text formatting options if your comic will include text.
If you use PowerPoint to create a comic, you can export as either an image file like JPEG or PNG or as a PDF file. If you save as an image file you can easily add your comic to other places like webpages or slides.
Our Posters with a Powerful Point guide has information about creating and editing images using PowerPoint, which you might find useful when making comics:
Canva is an web-based graphic design tool that allows you to create a range of things, and one thing that it can be used for is creating comics. Canva has a feature called frames which basically look like the panels of comics, so if you add these to a design you can drag other content into these frames to create a comic-like style. There's also a range of comic-like templates you can use to get started.
Bear in mind that Canva has a free and a paid-for version. At the University of York we do not have a licence for Canva, so you will only be able to use the free version, and you should not put any confidental or sensitive data into it.
As comics are made up of images, it shouldn't be surprising that you can use most image editing software to create comics. However, depending on the style of comic you are creating, you might need to think carefully about which image editing tool is best for the job.
Digital images can either be made up of pixels, tiny squares of colour, like in JPEG and PNG files, or they can be made up of geometry, points and lines, and then they're known as vector images and are often SVG files. If your comic is entirely in a line style like a cartoon, you might actually want to work entirely with vector images and use a vector image editor, whereas if you want to make your comic cusing photos or other images made up of pixels, you'll want to use a tool for 'raster' images instead.
With any image editing tool, it can be fiddly to put images together as comics, so you'll want to practice to see what works best for you. If you are going to draw any of the parts of your comic, you may also want to think about how you'll do that digitally (a raster image editing tool and a drawing tablet can be good - the Creativity Lab has some drawing tablets that can be used in there when it is open.
See our image editing guide for more on the different types of images and for details on different image editing software you can access:
Animation is when still images are manipulated in a way that makes them move. Animation can be used to create videos, GIFs, or even just moving parts on presentations or websites.
You'll probably have seen animated videos before! As well as being a fun style for children's films and television, animation can actually be useful for educating people and communicating complex ideas, as you can have moving images that can easily be manipulated. For example, for some concepts it can be difficult to show them in a filmed video, but through animation you might have representations or cartoon images that help people to understand the topic.
How you create animations will depend on the style of animation you are doing. There are lots of specific digital animation tools out there that allow you to move and change images and then they will automatically be animated between those positions and poses. You can also do digital versions of stop motion, where you take a lot of photos with slight differences between each one and then play them quickly in succession so they appear to move.
To plan any kind of animation, you'll need to think about the movement and what needs to change. You might want to create a storyboard, where you sketch out what will happen when. Planning animation is very similar to planning a video as both happen in time so need to be considered in terms of timing and space. You'll also need to think about whether you are working in 2D or 3D, as it is much more complex to work in three dimensions and you'll move into the territory of 3D modelling.
Many animation tools cost money and they can be complex to get started with, but that doesn't mean you can't make animations. We'll take a look at some digital tools that can be used to create different kinds of animations.
Note: Because animation can quickly get complex, there are now a lot of generative AI animation tools out there that claim to make the process much easier. If you're considering using these, make sure you're familiar with generative AI and some of the considerations surrounding it on our generative AI guide. In particular, watch out for accidentally creating animations that are uncanny, unnatural, or unsettling, unless that's the effect you're going for!
As with comics, PowerPoint is actually a great option for making animations, from very simple animations to more complex ones. Using PowerPoint's Animation tab and the Animation Pane, you can add a range of animations to anything you can add into PowerPoint, including photos, cartoons, drawings, text, and diagrams. You can also use the Morph transition to easily animate something from one position/size/colour to another. You can also create stop motion animation by putting one photo per slide and then setting the slide timing to a very low number, so the slides move very quickly from one to another.
Once you've created your animation, you can display it as a presentation or, more likely, you'll want to export it as a video file (MP4) or GIF to use elsewhere.
Again, as with comics, web-based graphic design tool Canva can be used to create simple animations. There are moving graphics you can add to your animations and you can draw the movement for your animations directly onto the canvas area. Canva is particularly useful for short animated graphics with moving text and images, and you can easily create animated GIFs using Canva by downloading in that format.
Bear in mind that Canva has a free and a paid-for version. At the University of York we do not have a licence for Canva, so you will only be able to use the free version, and you should not put any confidental or sensitive data into it.
Wick Editor is a free open-source tool for creating animations and games. You can easily draw pictures and animate them using Wick Editor, layering together parts of your image and changing it through time. On their website there's a range of tutorials to help you have a go at using it for animation.
As well as these simple options, there are a range of other animation tools out there. If you're looking to go more advanced, you might want to try Adobe Animate, which is available to use in the Creativity Lab. 3D modelling tool Blender can be used to animate your 3D models, as can Autodesk's Maya.