We-toon: A Communication Support System between Writers and Artists in Collaborative Webtoon Sketch Revision

We present a communication support system, namely We-toon, that can bridge the webtoon writers and artists during sketch revision (i.e., character design and draft revision). In the highly iterative design process between the webtoon writers and artists, writers often have difculties in precisely articulating their feedback on sketches owing to their lack of drawing profciency. This drawback makes the writers rely on textual descriptions and reference images found using search engines, leading to indirect and inefcient communications. Inspired by a formative study, we designed We-toon to help writers revise webtoon sketches and efectively communicate with artists. Through a GAN-based image synthesis and manipulation, We-toon can interactively generate diverse reference images and synthesize them locally on any user-provided image. Our user study with 24 professional webtoon authors demonstrated that We-toon outperforms the traditional methods in terms of communication efectiveness and the writers' satisfaction level related to the revised image.

• Human-centered computing → Collaborative content creation; User interface design; Interface design prototyping; Systems and tools for interaction design.