Design collaboration at Tapastic
Tapas Media specializes in bite-sized, snackable online content. Their mission is to visually re-create existing stories, making the content more fun to consume on the web and mobile.
Tapas media is one of the early adopters of Marqueed and use the app as an integral part of their workflow. Their service, Tapastic is a free platform for comic artists to showcase their work. We at Marqueed are comic junkies as well, and are excited to share an interview with Peter Mun . Peter talks about the culture and philosophy at Tapas Media, and how he works with his remote webtoon artists and translation team of eight using Marqueed. 1. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Hi, my name is Peter and I’m the Operations Manager/Translation Lead for Tapastic.com, a free platform for comic artists to showcase their work. I manage several areas within Tapastic, but my main areas of expertise are relations with foreign webtoon artists and translation. Basically all of the employees at Tapastic are comic junkies, and I’m not much different. Usually, it’s work then reading comics online and in book form and other various recreational/online activities ranging from gaming to exercise. 2. Where do you or people on your team draw your design inspirations from.
Most of the work that we do on Marqueed is from Korea. In Korea, webtoons are part of the people’s lives per se. Nearly 80-90% of Koreans who have access to the internet read webtoons on a daily basis. We’re motivated to bring high quality webtoons and introduce them to the American market. 3. Tell us a little about your team.
Currently, there are 8 people on our translation team, but we’re constantly growing. Besides me, all our translators work remotely. Every month, we try to schedule times to hang out and have fun with the translators who live within a driving distance away, however, it is difficult to this for all of our translators since some are based in different states as well. 4. What’s your office environment like? Is it the kind of place that has a ping-pong table and loud music playing, or is it more traditional?
We try to keep our office environment as lively as possible. When we work, we work and you’d think we’re more of a traditional work environment, but we also enjoy our time together. You’ll often see a group of us huddled around the round table chugging a few beers, laughing, and even talking about how we can grow the business. 5. What do you like best about where you work?
Work is great, because we’re surrounded by individuals who have common hobbies and common goals. Many of the employees here are not just data-driven, but are themselves artists. Some of the comics on our website were personally authored or drawn by the employees of our site.
6. What is the first thing you do when you get to work?
There will usually be someone in the office who has something to share with you. Given our line of business, there’s usually something funny that pops up on our website and someone always has to share it w/ the entire company. 7. What are some of the tools your team uses today. Which ones do you love and can't live without?
Photoshop. Google. Photoshop is a must, given the fact that all of our typesetting is done on Photoshop. If there was one thing we use the most often, it is Google. File storage takes place in Google, and our typesetters can easily access PDS files and upload completed .jpg’s into our shared Google Drive. Drive also enables us to have shared documents where we can schedule deadlines, create spreadsheets that help with translation consistency, and so forth. Because our teams are mostly remote, Gmail and Hangout enables us to always be in communication w/ each other. 8. How were you collaborating on designs and images with others before you started using Marqueed?
We used Trello. Basically, we would upload a .jpg file onto the site. The translator would look at the .jpg and write out the entire script. It was difficult to note where the translation was supposed to link to, especially for onomatopoeias. 9. How has your design process changed today and how has Marqueed improved it?
Due to Marqueed, it is possible for us to insert comments where they want them to be inserted. We reduced the need for extra communication between artists/ translators/ and typesetters. 10. What do you love about Marqueed?
Marqueed is great because it makes our work much simpler. Where before, we were in essence just translating scripts, we now get a better visual of the comic that we’re translating and therefore creating better quality content that matches to the tone of the art itself.
Thank you!