An Interview with toonlet.com's Craig Schwartz

Portland-based toonlet.com is dedicated to making cartoon-creation easy. Launched in December 2007, 10,000 toons have been created so far, with just shy of 2 million comic-views served around the world. As a test of toonlet’s system, I logged on recently to make a quick sample. In all of 10 minutes, I had created an account and busted out my first toon. Easy, peasy.

Back in July I got a chance to sit down with toonlet co-founder and CEO Craig Schwartz to chat about where the idea behind toonlet came from and what he’s learned from the experience.

Craig Schwartz self-portrait, courtesy of the car(toon)ist

What were you doing before you started working on toonlet?

CS: I had about three or four years in the video game industry, working on titles like “The Sims” and “Sim City,” and I did a little bit of consulting while I was doing toonlet, writing mission text for “Spore.” Prior to that I was doing Web work, working for a company called Hotwired. I did a very, very short stint at Macromedia as part of their Shockwave team, but it was too brief to really say.

What was the inspiration behind creating this site?

CS: When I was working at EA, I was working on titles that were basically simulation games, but what was really exciting me were games like “Dance Dance Revolution” — because [they offered] a different way of interacting with technology, and it made my heart beat faster, which doesn't really happen in very many situations in my life unfortunately.

Sweating and getting a workout as the consequence of playing a video game was really appealing to me. And so I left to make a video game that was going to basically let people make music in the same way — rather than dancing to pre-programmed songs, you'd actually dance or wave your hands or mouse or keyboard or whatever the input method was, and be able to make music in fun ways.

I was doing a little bit of coding, and I'm not much of a coder. We were about three months into it, and I had hit a wall where I couldn't contribute very much anymore, and so I started just doodling. It was actually going to be a feature idea for this game. And so I started just drawing these simple shapes — a line for a mouth, or a hook for a nose, two dots for eyes — and I just did tons of them and scanned them all in, kind of slapped together a little bit of code, and it would just sort of randomly throw the parts up there, and it made faces. I didn't draw any faces, and all the time I was just making these little parts, and the end result was something that looked like a cartoon character.

And I thought about it, and thought about it, and decided, maybe that's a direction we need to move in. And so we put the brakes on what we were doing, and changed paths, and we haven't looked back since.

It's a treat when the side project becomes the main event. Since you've rolled toonlet out, have you learned anything surprising from the way people have interacted with it?

CS: What I've noticed is that people get involved with the tools, get really sucked in, and it takes them a fairly long time to create a character, and it's because they're really just exploring. You can create a character in two seconds by clicking the random character button on toonlet, but you get so engaged that it takes more time than we really wanted. What we were going for was basically a 15-minute coffee break experience where once you have a library of characters that are built, and moods that accompany those characters, you can put together your comics relatively quickly.

So the engagement of the users [in the character creation process] is actually hampering one of our goals, and we need to find a better balance for that. Obviously we want people who get engaged to play with the tools for as long as they want. But at the same time, if people think it's going to take them forty-five minutes to an hour to create a character or comic, that's a significant time commitment. And so a lot of people I think use it a few times, and don't use it as regularly. They may come back once a week, once a month to make something, but they're not using it necessarily daily, the way we'd like. And it's just because their initial experience was almost too engaging, which is an interesting dilemma. We need to beef up the tools to maybe auto-generate moods, and maybe even minimize the user choices that they have in some places — things like that.

Beyond the amount of time people spend on that upfront phase, have there been other ways that people have used toonlet that you didn’t expect?

CS: The most surprising thing was the uptake from educators and librarians and students using it in an educational setting — it just hadn't occurred to me. It makes perfect sense now that I see it in action, but I was thinking about it in totally different terms. So we've seen strips get made that detailed all of the processes of the library ("This is how you use the cards") and signage as well. ("Here's a computer, here's the computer area.")

So they’re not just using it for mass communications over the Internet and such, people are also using it locally?

CS: Yes.

Hard to beat the joy of unexpected applications....