Scott McCloud

Pff, I love Patreon and I feel like that is basically "micropayments that actually work". If you look at Scott McCloud's original proposal for micropayments ([1], parts 5/6), the only thing that's really not viable is the idea that every reader paying 25¢/mo would work - in practice, transaction fees mean that about $2/mo is the minimum viable payment to actually mean something, especially when you factor in that you are not going to get every reader to pay. Luckily it turns out that you can also get some readers to pay $5/$10/$50/mo, or even more. (Factoring in inflation, that $2/mo now was about $1.12 back in 2000 when McCloud proposed the idea.) 1: http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/index.html

10 years ago, Google was one of the most exciting companies in the world to me, culminating in that amazing Google Chrome comic https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/ Their products and software seemed genuinely inspiring. Now, it seems to just be maintenance or death. Seemingly happens with all once-loved tech companies to some degree. It's quite sad but I guess time moves on. Totally self-inflicted for them though, they decided to stop moving forward

Yes, read the classic 'book' Understanding Comics, which is itself a comic/graphic novel about theories and practice behind creating graphic novels and telling stories with the medium. As plain text it would be very dull and difficult to get the main points, but as a graphic novel it directly demonstrates how and why things work in the graphic medium. It's really an incredible book that should be read by anyone doing creative things. https://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/

YouTube creators are highly undervalued. How far away are we from direct micropayments to creators, as envisioned by Scott McCloud? http://www.scottmccloud.com/3-home/essays/2003-09-micros/micros.html Right now, YouTube has to deal with advertisers on behalf of its creators, which means the perverse incentives of advertisers leak through and affect YouTube's relationship with its creators. YouTube could seek to outsource the advertiser relationship to the "Networks" that aggregate YouTube creators. There could be a model where you have independent creators that thrive off of micropayments, while larger channels could be aggregated by networks which deal with the advertisers. Right now, Patreon is great, but the friction is still a bit too high.

After reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud [1], I came to a similar realization, and wish he could provide the same depth and thoughtful illustration to many more subjects, especially technical or mathematical. Even if comics aren't your thing, I would _highly_ recommend this book. It's a fantastic lesson in communication and composition. 1: http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/

the one book these lists always forget: "Understanding Comics" http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/index.html in my opinion, it's at par with "don't make me think". i recommend reading them both at once.

http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/chess/index.html I don't know about chess but it seems to follow some kind of pattern when zoomed out.. Is it a famous game or set of moves?

Thank you, those are indeed excellent comics. I think this one is especially good: http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/mi/mi-25/mi-25-1.html

"... I love the comic book format of this - great idea! ..." Thank Scott McCloud. McCloud is to the comic world what Stallman ~ http://www.scottmccloud.com/inventions/inventions.html (Creators bill of rights) and Linus is to the computing world by writing & thinking extensively how to innovate ~ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url?_encoding=UTF8&… and push both the art and science of comics as hard as he can. My favourites include http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/mi/mi-archive.html and all time favourite Monkey Town ~ http://www.scottmccloud.com/comics/mi/mi-17/mi-17.html

Having never heard of HyperCard that was a fascinating, I want to say rabbit hole, yet more like metro stop to a well curated museum. Did not realize there was such a short degree of Kevin Bacon between Hypercard and Hypermedia. Ars has an interesting 30 year retrospective [3] where they discuss how Hypercard almost immediately beget Mosaic. > "I got a HyperCard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them in X-windows" Also some pretty neat commentary from the author Bill Atikinson about realizing how close he had been to developing the entire world wide web browsing experience. > "I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I'd grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser." Myst was apparently also a direct decedent. > the Cyan software company originally wrote their hugely popular puzzle/adventure game Myst as a HyperCard stack. Reading back through these, it actually made me wonder a bit at how few storyboard, or still frame games, or click-a-choice adventures there are in web pages. It seems like such an obvious format for Myst, 7th Guest, ect... games where you click and drag objects, and choose buttons or areas to move from Myst scene to Myst scene. Another topic in that vein is Scott McCloud's work with the infinite canvas and Follow That Trail. [4] [1]…

We had a rather successful Ask YC on this several days ago - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341138 It did focus mostly on online PR, however, so perhaps others could provide deeper coverage on this question on areas I know of but have not tried (or no longer use). For example: - trade shows - schwag - guerrilla marketing - speaking at events (supposedly can work wonders if you do it right) - publicity stunts (think Richard Branson) - becoming a press contact who's quoted a lot - producing an event for your industry / sector yourself (worked wonders for Carsonified!) - presenting your product in a remarkable way (think of how Google presented Chrome with the comicbook approach - get inspired by Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud - http://www.scottmccloud.com/ - or see http://xplane.com/ for a more corporate look) - paying for word of mouth (risky) - on the street promotion (booths, etc) - leveraging networks like LinkedIn - sponsorships - cross promotions - affiliate marketing - e-mail list marketing (not spam) - lead development and phone calls (surprisingly effective in many areas, though I don't do it as it's not relevant to my sector) - writing a book on your topic (works better if you're a consultant OR you're happy to be the "face" of your product) - social objects (look at Hugh MacLeod's career as of the last 3 years) - be interviewed - do your own interviews of people in your industry for your company's blog (see FiveRuns' blog for…

Thanks that is very interesting! Here is Scott McCloud's original page for the book: https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

Chrome as a project was still a Google thing even if they used Konqueror's rendering library. The process model was the novel selling point at the time from my memory [1]. [1] https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

That must be a reply to Scott McCloud's "Reinventing Comics". It came out July 25, 2000 and this strip is from June 22, 2001 (under a year later). One part of the book was about micropayments. Edit: oh yeah, obviously it is. The character talking is Scott McCloud's character, and it's titled "I can't stop talking" and Scott's webcomic at the time was called "I can't stop thinking". In fact they must be replies to these posts (comics) from June 2001 about micropayments: https://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-5/icst-5.html https://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-6/icst-6.html

I'm not a comic reader, but if anyone's interesting in the related media-theory, these two popular books should prove relevant: - [scottmccloud.com - Understanding Comics](https://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/) - [Ways of Seeing - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Seeing)

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_04.html http://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/ In early-mid 2008, I created a comic book for Google explaining the inner workings of their new open source browser Google Chrome. If I'm mixing this up with https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis, that's still 10 years.

Good old micropayments. Now's our chance to make a hojillion dollars! https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/22 (2001, parody of http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/)

Understanding Comics by Scott Mccloud http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/index.html The four printed books by Edward Tufte https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ Successful Drawing by Andrew Loomis Composition: Understanding Line, Notan and Color by Arthur Wesley Dow

Here are fixed links for the comics "(1 and 2)" in the first panel: http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-5/icst-5.html http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/icst-6/icst-6.html

No doubt this “sequential art” and “comic-like format” notion was at least partially inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”[1]. By Bret’s own admission, the book is one of the works that had “an extraordinary effect on [his] life or way of thinking”[2]. I agree. That book is phenomenal. [1]: http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/ [2]: http://worrydream.com/#!/Links

Immediately reminded me of the Google Chrome comic http://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

I think it started earlier (around 2008) with Scott McCloud doing a comic describing the architecture of the (then newly introduced) Chrome browser, especially the innovation of running each tab in a separate process - http://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

I first learned about The Big Triangle from Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics". http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/triangle/index.html http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~mfram/Media/0505-UC-triangle-all.jpg Filed under "I believe, but cannot prove": The three-way tension is a recurring pattern. When trying to understand new things, I often try to reframe things as a triangle. When pondering intractable problems, I favor three-way solutions. Some quick examples from memory... Project management: time, money, scope. aka Quality: Fast, good, cheap. US Govt balance of power: Executive, Congress, Judiciary Language design: imparative, declarative, functional Pop music: harmony, melody, lyrics

Reminds me of Destroy!! http://www.scottmccloud.com/2-print/older/destroy/

Scott McCloud's _Understanding Comics_ presents a more robust paradigm than abstract-not. He posits a triangle whereby visual communication selects a space between three poles: representative , abstract , realistic. I encourage you to look at his slideshow on the topic. http://www.scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/triangle/index.html

Reminds me of Scott McCloud's infinite canvas idea: http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/canvas/index.html Impressive by the way!

About this comic: My Obsession with Chess 1998-1999 My fourth online comic seemed to strike a chord with many readers, despite requiring side-scrolling as well as down-scrolling (which I'll admit, can be pretty annoying). This one's autobiographical; an account of a childhood obsession with "the most violent game" and how that obsession returned in my late twenties. It's all true, but pretty weird, 'cause I was, um... a weird kid. I visited the legendary Xerox PARC shortly after completing the comic and they offered to print it for me on their humungous format printer. In 2008, the print-out was exhibited at New York's Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art and Bowling Green University as an artifact of webcomics history. Anything more than ten years old is like the dead sea scrolls in webcomics. From http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/chess/index.html

Yep, "Reinventing Comics". Here's his personal page on the books: http://scottmccloud.com/store/store.html

There's such a huge gap in usability between Mapquest and the first Google Maps release it would be hard to overstate it. Both gmail and google maps were groundbreaking not for the fact that they gave you "webmail" or "maps on the web" but for the fact that they did so as properly interactive applications where the HTTP connection got out of your way and you could dynamically interact. Back then Google was doing this kind of groundbreaking stuff. Other people had all the technology pieces but Google was kind of the only company doing these things at scale and letting their engineers cook it up and ship it quickly, and in the early/mid-2000s it seemed like they were dropping a new "wow, nifty" type of thing every few months. From the people I know who were there at the time (I joined later, end of 2011 time frame, right as "the social wars" and the G+ era was happening) it sounds to me like a serious empowered-nerd culture where people just got out of your way so you could do stuff with all the neat tools that were available to you. That era at Google has ended some years ago now. It's too big, too political (and no, I don't mean "woke" politics, but corporate / promo / perf politics) and if you had a "neat idea" like how, say, Gmail started, you'd have a hell of a time making it happen past the layers of product managers etc. ... And if you work in a codebase like, say, Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated…

Emoji are less abstract than words. That is to say, the shape of a word is less connected to the thing it depicts. It barely changes the perceived meaning of the word "face" if it's depicted in Arial or Times New Roman, but it makes a big difference to the perceived meaning of a hypothetical "face" emoji whether that face is smiling or frowning in different fonts. When you have a concrete depiction of something, you are forced to provide details. The problem is that users cannot tell what details are standard and which are only in their font. Hence more guidance is needed for creators of emoji to ensure important, necessary details are consistent. Scott McCloud discusses iconography and the differences between how words and pictures convey ideas in "Understanding Comics". I don't think he has a perfect model, but his Big Triangle is a pretty good starting point for a discussion. http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/triangle/index.html The further you go left in that triangle, the more guidance is required to ensure that all implementations are depicting the same thing.