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Archive for ‘Site Update’


On the Drawing Board: An Update

Flame chasing a man down the stairs.

This probably won’t be in the book. It just makes me smile.

As some of you know, I’ve been working diligently on a big fat book about visual communication. It’s turned into an unusually complex project and it’s taking a long time, so thank you for your patience.

Long story short; I set out to catalogue all the fundamental design principles that successful visual communication is built upon. Early on, I was describing it as a kind of “Elements of Style for Visual Communication.” The problem is that as gargantuan a project as that was likely to be on its own, all of those design principles kept leading me back to the underlying principles of visual cognition. And visual cognition kept leading me back to evolution and biology. So the book kept growing and… Well, here we are.

I’ve finished the layouts and I’m working on revisions. Then on to finished art.

I’m still traveling and doing lectures and workshops, of course. I’ve also taken on some side projects here and there; mostly nonfiction technical comics explaining everything from neural networks to block chains. But the visual communications project is still where my heart lives most of the time, and where I’ve directed most of my work hours.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter for the occasional update (this blog will stay pretty quiet for a while until I can clear my drawing desk), or if you catch me on the road, you may see some of these ideas flying past you at a rate of 30-slides-per-minute. I’ve had a lot of fun working them into my talks!

Assuming that America is still standing when I’m finally done, I hope you’ll join me as we kick off a whole new great debate on a topic that’s increasingly important to me.


Seymour Responds…

And the first one to get that reference wins second-biggest nerd prize.

Don’t know if you’d glanced at the right sidebar, but we now have a proper feed, as well as (thanks to Lori) a syndicated livejournal feed.


Testing…

Okay, if this worked, we should now have a fully-functioning blog (comments, archives, etc) thanks to the excellent work of Mr. Tyler Martin who converted my oddball front page into a WordPress Theme in record time. I’m sure we’ll be tweaking a bit this week, but hopefully everything will work like you wacky kids with your goldarned gadgets expect.

And if any of you budding webmasters/hapless cartoonists need similar work done, Tyler’s definitely The Man (everyone agreed when I was asking around and now I can join the chorus). You may also want to check out the great all-in-one solutions of Tyler and John Bintz’s classy ComicPress.

Note: If anything goes wrong, 99 to 1 it was my fault.

Oh, yeah. And um…

*sigh*

I finally joined Facebook and Twitter.

Why yes, I am going straight to Hell. How ever did you guess?


Woot!

Hello again. I’m back from  hibernation with a big site redesign. Take a look around and feel free to let me know what you think of the new look (including bug reports and typo alerts, of which I’m sure there’ll be plenty). Once I’m happy with the static content, I’ll be converting this page to a proper blog with comments, archives, rss, etc.

This site first launched in mid-1998, a bit over ten years ago (a lifetime in both internet years and dog years) so it was long overdue for a face-lift. When working on the redesign, I did a lot of clicking around for ideas, even visiting randomwebsite a couple of times, where I tripped over this video:

512kb.net

…which, just so you know, is exactly what it felt like to be making webcomics for those first few years: two parts exhilaration, one part crazy. I enjoyed it, but that’s how my personality breaks down most days anyway.

The last few years have been a different kind of exhilaration and a different kind of crazy for me. I wrote and drew Making Comics, our family went to all 50 States, I did a ton of appearances, put out a 576-page Zot! collection, did a comic book for Google, and now I’m officially beginning work on a massive graphic novel I’ve been secretly plotting out for over 20 years. But the site’s been pretty quiet and I’d like to change that now.

While working on the graphic novel, I’m hoping to finally return to both regular blogging and to gradually finishing up The Right Number as well as one or two more Morning Improvs. I may not be making webcomics full-time for a while, just an hour or two of web work each morning, but I’d like to at least keep a toe dipped in the water on a regular basis starting next week.

Be seeing you.

–Scott