Google Chrome has set a new trend by launching with a comic strip designed by Scott McCloud and mailed to influential media outlets. The comic was scanned and published in a now-classic posting by Philip Lenssen. Lenssen had the internet world buzzing for 24 hours before the browser was actually available for download.

Google is not the only company that has used this idea, and strangely enough, Microsoft has itself published a comic-like faux-children’s-book called: Mommy, Why is there a Server in the House? [Via Garr Reynolds].

Panel from the Google Chrome launch comic strip

So here’s the question: if you were trying to do the same, what are the key lessons to take away in designing the comic-strip-message?

It turns out that the power of Google’s comic, like all good presentations, comes from successful application of few key principles. Garr Reynolds abstracted these from Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics.

I have here further simplified Garr Reynolds’ analysis, but read his article if you want to go beyond my bare (comic-strip?) summary here. I take away three lessons from Google, McCloud, and Reynolds:

1. Amplify by Simplifying: keep your ideas simple but not simplistic. Don’t eliminate texture, just bring it in by focusing on selected details. Comics give the broad view as well strategically-chosen highlighted elements.
2. Know your Audience: whom are you addressing? What aspects of the product/idea are they interested in? How can you translate their concerns and your solutions into nouns, and the nouns into physical objects, and those objects into pictures?
3. Break the Mould: these days the mould is being set on the Web by the expectation of a blog, a YouTube video, a viral email. How quickly Google broke that mould in this new campaign! And how perfectly they tuned the message to meet the needs of the early adopter! This very success, though, would be enough to make me reconsider the comic as launch vehicle — that particular mould has been spectacularly broken already and you will need to spring new surprises to be noticed.