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Humor Illustration Design,

a Summary of Illustrations, Designs, and Projects

Jochen Gasser

Bahnhofstraße 10, 39040 Vahrn (Bz), Italy

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Abstract. This paper summarizes my work as an illustrative designer; it covers

details of my inspiration, ideas, final works, and specific projects that I have

worked on throughout my career. This paper is organized in parts; Humor

Illustration Design as a Solution Mechanism for Various Problems describes

my view on how humor functions in the world today and how it alleviates

issues. Illustration as a Tool is where I explain the workings behind and the

outcome of an ongoing project and the goals I’m aiming for as a designer in

terms of reaching my audience. I then show how I incorporate my work into

marketing strategies in Humor Illustration Design as Marketing Strategy.

Finally I focus on the project that I will present in Las Vegas in July.

Keywords: Humor Illustration Design, Humor, Andreas Hofer, Humanity,

Emotional Connection, Gondola.

1Humor Illustration Design as a Solution Mechanism for Various Problems

In a powerful and function-oriented world, it is more important than ever not to come short on emotions and humanity when it comes to design and illustration. The motto “Sex sells”, is an evident example of how humor functions in our society; at first the directness of this motto seems crude and grabs our attention, then it eases and brings about a laugh. Humor is a concept that can be used to reach audiences within seconds, and draws them in through amusement and emotional connection. Illustration is a way to depict humor; it is an ideal means of expression as themes can be apprehended and understood with no specific boundary. In other words, illustration allows individual opinions and views on certain themes through imagination.

2Illustration as a Tool

Since the beginning of my career as a freelance illustrator in 2008, I have been interested in innovative ways to apply the concept of “Humor Illustration Design”. I worked together with a historian named Norbert Parschalk on my first project. It was based on the idea of historical story telling through a new style. The main idea was to

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create “comics”, in which history and humor were combined, without questioning the significance and plausibility of a given storie’s contents.

The first story I transformed into a comic was the biography of “Andreas Hofer”, a local freedom fighter and hero in the South Tirol (a small region of Italy, far north in the Alps)(Fig.1 shows an exerpt from the book). In this region of Italy – in my homel-and –, the status and importance of Andreas Hofer can be compared to that of Abra-ham Lincoln in the USA. I designed the illustrations and Norbert Parschalk helped me formulate the texts.

Fig. 1. Exerpt from the Andreas Hofer book

But there were consequences that came with animating this historical figure and things went through the roof when the storybook was first published and released; as quoted, one cannot make “Serious historical figures into comical heroes.” However the book was soon accepted and became a best seller. It also serves as an educational tool for many middleschool students and a number of others in general.

The concept of this project was simple and came down to one question and goal: How could I get people from each age group who were historically ‘uninterested’, to want to experience and learn history? The solution lay in the combination of texts and matching cartoons and comicstrips; I recreated each story based on this combination, with the intention of finding a way to give people no option but to learn the history; they would have to read the texts in order to understand the illustrations they were looking. And this worked!

I designed the humorous elements of my story books with the purpose of “reward-ing” the reader, who had been “forced” to do something undesireable (i.e. to read) in order to understand the story. This concept takes after the motto: “You can learn and also laugh!”. I didn’t want to undermine or question the seriousness of the biogra-phies however, and so, I only chose scenes that are either proven or unverifiable. This is how the subtitle of my book series, “An Illustraded History”, was founded. Based on this subtitle, my books can be considered “subjective history” rather than as “joke” or “satire”.

My work focuses on and is demonstrated through the concept of “humanity”, which is the central theme and a crucial building block in the thoughts and procedures