The grid evolved to the point where in some strips in only appeared without the outlines of the individual panels of a strip. It is clear that some of the drawings were drawn on checkered paper originally and the grid was scanned in, but it is unclear whether some had the grid added digitally to match the others.
But that would be weird given the five comics without this grid. In a few comics the grid is black and on some the grid was faint as if it was poorly scanned or Randall had attempted to erase it he noted having done this on Barrel - Part 2. The last comic by number to use the grid was Love , which was actually posted relatively early on the LiveJournal account but received a high number when the comics were renumbered.
The last comic by date to use gridlines was Bowl , although even these comics may have been posted on LiveJournal out of order.
The faint remains of gridlines in comics Fourier and Meat Cereals suggest that Randall may have erased gridlines in these and other comics as well. In , Randall revived the blue grid as a background image for what if?
Similarly, the art process has evolved. The first comics appear to have been physical sketches pencil or ink which were scanned and directly posted; although some comics occasionally featured a digitally added caption. The first comic that appears to have had digital inking and effects although it could also just be a different physical medium is T-shirts.
The comics continued to be hand drawn, and hand lettered, with possibly a bit more digital polish. The comic slowly evolved to apparently become entirely digitally inked and lettered. Although early comics included sentence-case text, beginning with comic Jacket , Randall began using all-caps although it took several strips for the all-caps to become the standard format.
Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb. And then when we put up the blog, we included an "Ask a Question" link. And since then, the volume of questions has been high enough that I don't think any set of two or three people could read them all. So I pretty much just sit down whenever I have a few spare hours and go through them and answer the questions that come in and try to see if there's anything that would make a good article.
Of the ones you've done, do you have a favorite so far? The one that I recently put up : "What would happen if the land masses of the world were rotated 90 degrees? And I kept on thinking, "Oh, what about this thing? But I also really enjoyed the first one that I posted , and that's been one of a lot of people's favorites: the one about the baseball thrown at 90 percent of the speed of light.
That one I have a soft spot for because it was the first one I put up. And I heard from people who know a lot more about these things than I do -- I got email from a bunch of physicists at MIT saying, "Hey, I saw your relativist baseball scenario, and I simulated it out on our machine, and I've got some corrections for you.
It showed there were some effects that I hadn't even thought about. I'm probably going to do a follow-up at some point using all the material they sent me.
I imagine, given all that, that the posts are incredibly labor-intensive. How long would an average one take you? I'm still deciding how long to make them -- and part of that is just figuring out how long it takes to answer the average question. When I started out, I didn't really know what to expect from the questions, so I wasn't sure if I'd be able to answer them quickly or what.
But I think, now, it's about a day of work in which I don't do much else. That's it? I was figuring it'd take much longer! Well, that's a day of solid work -- I mean, most people don't actually work through a whole day.
I certainly don't. So in practice, it's a few days, because there's a lot of email checking, or having to go run an errand. Makes sense. And, design-wise, I love how each article stands on its own -- a single product on a single page. Since that's the same structure you use for xkcd, I'm wondering: Why did you choose to repeat that format? Especially because I was so delayed in actually getting the site up , I had a lot of time to think about how I wanted it to look.
Did I want to have individual entries, or did I want to do more of a blog format, or did I want to have a bunch of questions answered as they came in? So we settled on the current format, and it seems to work pretty well. One of the things I've learned with doing xkcd is that you sort of give people, "Here's the thing, and here's the button you can press to get another thing.
Do I really want another page like this? I'm not a huge fan of some of the infinite scrolling things that are happening now. I think it's really annoying to want to read partway through, and then you navigate away, and can't get back. Does What If, at this point, have a business model? When I first started xkcd, it was all stuff I drew during classes -- because I wasn't paying attention to the lecture. And then when I started drawing them from home, I found that I'd have a lot of trouble coming up with ideas.
And then I'd get a project and start working on that -- and I found that, instead of it taking up more of my time, I had more comic ideas per day and was drawing more of them. So they all reinforced each other. The format would definitely make sense as a book. But for the moment, it's just been so much fun to write and answer. My experience of the Internet has been that if you make something really cool, the neatness speaks for itself.
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Where did all this start? I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. I started drawing more seriously, gained a lot more readers, started selling t-shirts on the site, and am currently shipping t-shirts and drawing this comic full-time.
It's immensely fun and I really appreciate y'all's support. Why can't I read the whole comic mouseover text in Firefox? They can be read with extensions like Long Titles , or by right-clicking on the images and going to 'properties', then clicking and dragging to read the whole thing.
This is a bug in Firefox, Mozilla Bug It has been outstanding for many years now. Note: It looks like it's been fixed in Firefox 3.
Now, as an added tweak, to keep the tooltips from expiring while you're reading, you can use this.
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