On the contrary, this phenomenon seems pretty isolated to nerds/tech-interested-people. Are there any areas outside of technology where you have seen something presented in a similarly childish way?

The reason these exist is because these topics are big and somewhat inaccessible, but they are relevant to people who wouldn't learn them in the normal course of their lives. You wouldn't expect to see as many for something that is commonly known in a given field and doesn't matter to people outside it, or things which are already quite accessible without trying to make them super-friendly.

Here's an example that does something similar with the law: http://lawcomic.net/

You'll notice that the law has the same characteristics I identified earlier in technology — it's very relevant to ordinary people, but it's large and inaccessible enough that most people don't really understand it and setting a law book in front of them wouldn't help.

> How dare educators attempt to entertain?

The content is harder to read and to follow, and concepts aren't as accessible. Even if it's an attempt at entertaining, this project falls very short of serving any educational purpose.

> The content is harder to read and to follow, and concepts aren't as accessible.

For you.

It can be difficult sometimes, but it's very important when evaluating content proposed as educational to ignore personal knowledge and experience on a topic and focus on the learning outcomes desired by the authors of training material, and not impose our own expectations and biases.

There's no "for you" to be added, the comic has severe accessibility issues.

If you think it's fine, I wager it's for one of two reasons:

- You may have decided it's fine because you're ignoring the issues by dismissing them as "it's because I'm not the target audience".

- You may actually be in a minority of people who have no issues reading this.

Put it this way, if I print content in light-grey on a pastel-white background and have people complaining about this, I shouldn't be defending it with "Oh it's not fine for you, but for other people it's fine". That's the whole challenge of accessibility: Making your content accessible to the biggest chunk of your target audience (and if possible, beyond that).

I agree with you on the accessibility angle, from the perspective of users with reading disabilities, color blindness, etc. I am not sure if that was the angle you were aiming for.

As for the accessibility of the ideas, they are presented clearly. Where jargon can't be avoided, it is presented by the role it plays, and a simple explanation of what it is not (see the digital signature panels) that presents an idea, gives the user enough information that they can start forming a question and addresses an incredibly common misconception.

As for being in a minority, I don't know. What I do know is that as a person who has to deal with dyslexia on a daily basis in a largely text based position as a remote security engineer, I found this content to be very approachable, and it got positive feedback from several folks I shared it with this morning, including an early childhood educator and a retired teacher, so YMMV.

As far as not being the target audience, frankly, I am squarely in the target audience as I am always looking for new and effective ways to teach people this stuff because as an infosec weenie a big chunk of my job is helping people avoiding the pitfalls of technology by helping others understand how to build secure or maintain basic opsec. This comic is not effective for me, since I am technical enough to need better resources, but it is super great for a project manager who might need to ramp up knowledge about why HTTPS or TLS is important without needed to know how to configure or implement it.

> As for the accessibility of the ideas, they are presented clearly.

They clearly aren't. Some users already pointed out they had problems getting what the cat was supposed to represent. That's a telltale sign of how bad the content was presented when a significant portion of the audience, and one which is educated and technically inclined, has a problem understanding and tracking the meaning of a basic concept that's presented right in the very start.

People aren't "reading it wrong". The comic is simply poorly thought-out and the execution makes it needlessly hard to go around these problems.

I'd have to agree with the parent. And it has nothing to do with personal knowledge/experience/expectations/biases. The linked 'comic' is bad in ways that I think many people would agree on.

I'm not talking about the content or even the "cutesy" style, but the layout/formatting itself. The lack of space or separating lines between the panels makes it quite difficult to follow the chronological order of the story. The font used for dialog is atrocious. And the harsh colors all placed on top of a stark white background isn't easy on the eyes. These are things that all detract from any possible learning outcomes, no matter what they are.

I think a lot of people in this thread are arguing that 'cutesy style = bad', but I think the real reason they might be thinking that is because it's actually just this particular instance of cutesy style is bad.

> The lack of space or separating lines between the panels makes it quite difficult to follow the chronological order of the story.

I agree on the need for lines to delineate between panels. As for the order of the story, it is written in English, and like most comics or visual presentation materials is organized in a left to right, top to bottom layout.

The font used is not great, but it is a sans serif font, and while not designed specifically to be accessible to dyslexic folks, I find it easier to read than many other sans serif fonts, in part owing to the distinctive shape of each of the glyphs. I would prefer more spacing between the letters, but to be fair, I only made that observation after I turned off my letter-spacing:2px user-style

You say harsh colors on white background, I say high contrast is very valuable to me as someone who is dyslexic - I find high contrast content easier to consume.

I really hate when people pretend their opinion is fact

You are free to interpret my comment as an isolated opinion and disregard it as a baseless assertion, but you'd be repeating the age old mistake of disregarding user opinions when evaluating user interfaces. Personally I believe that paying attention to user grievences, particularly when they are very recurrent and objective, is the smart thing to do and the fastest path to develop adequate products. If you feel you're better served by ignoring recurrent and needless mistakes and insist on repeating them then be my guest.

Would you propose that we all precede subjective statements with "in my opinion..."? In my opinion, it is your opinion that the parent posted their opinion as fact. In my opinion, it is clear that the parent was simply asserting their opinion, as demonstrated by your accurate (in my opinion) recognition of their opinion as an opinion.

I really hate when people assume bad faith like that. What you did there is akin to calling a falsehood a lie. Although this is accusing people of deliberately lying to themselves or something.

I'm sorry to say it, but that framing actually makes me see more merit in the comment you're responding to, when I didn't much before. I'm of the opinion that people do deliberately lie to themselves, quite regularly. To me, it's a fundamental part of cognitive dissonance. Whether it applies here, I don't know, but now I have to consider it.

:-) Sure, I agree. We don't know. The comment I was replying to snarkily and passively-aggressively (said it without saying it) assumed he knew for sure (I won't say 'pretended to know'). But it was ironically more certainly what they were accusing the other of, presenting opinion as fact, than what the other was doing, as another commenter already noted.

Also it was hostile in tone. If I, for example, thought you were being too silly, compare writing "I think you're being too silly" with writing "I really hate when people are too silly." It begs the question, and in a hostile way. He wasn't talking to the person but snidely about them.

Yeah, I definitely get what you mean. I try to see if there's merit in what people say, even on occasions where they forgot their manners at home (as I've done plenty), but in this case, they didn't bother to justify anything here. It makes me think there wasn't really much thought behind it past the craving to be rude.

Or, I just don't like when people summarily dismiss and deride things that don't personally appeal to them, even when others find value in it. I think it's hard to justify calling my direct response passive, regardless of how it was phrased, but if it makes you all feel better to defend the bullies go right on ahead.