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Scott McCloud
Personal blog · scottmccloud.comdesignwritingculture
Scott McCloud's personal blog at scottmccloud.com covers design, writing and culture. Since 2008, 40 different Hacker News readers have linked it 54 times, most often “The Google Chrome Comic (2008)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-02-23, and you can follow it by feed.
54mentions?
40HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- The Google Chrome Comic (2008)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-09-08
- /googlechrome/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-05-11
- /1-webcomics/chess/index.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-10-24
- Misunderstanding Micropayments (2003)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-08-01
- /2-print/1-uc/index.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-01-15
- /2-print/1-uc/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-02-10
- The Infinite Canvas2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-09-19
- Five Card Nancy (1999)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-12-26
- My Obsession With Chess2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-08-19
- /4-inventions/triangle/index.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-06-15
What Hacker News says?
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/
Comment linking /googlechrome/
on “Show HN: A coloring book of data structures and algorithms”Submitted My Obsession with Chess as a story · 156 points
HN discussionI 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... 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 fav…
Comment linking /4-inventions/triangle/index.html
on “If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it”Submitted My Obsession With Chess as a story · 88 points
HN discussionThere'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 thi…
Comment linking /googlechrome/
on “Why I Quit Google’s WebAssembly Team, and How It Made Me Sick”Submitted The Google Chrome Comic (2008) as a story · 59 points
HN discussionhttps://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.
Comment linking /googlechrome/
on “Site Isolation in Firefox”Submitted Misunderstanding Micropayments (2003) as a story · 41 points
HN discussionReminds me of Scott McCloud's infinite canvas idea: http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/canvas/index.html Impressive by the way!
Comment linking /4-inventions/canvas/index.html
on “Xkcd: Click and Drag”Submitted Five Card Nancy (1999) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAfter 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/
Comment linking /2-print/1-uc/
on “The Children's Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes”Submitted 5 Card Nancy Dada-Ist Card Game w/ Nancy Comics (2009) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI am totally convinced Patreon (or the patreon model) is the future of content creation. Ethical, decentralized, economically viable flourishing of the arts. Scott McCloud called this in the early 2000's. (Then the Penny Arcade guys lambasted him and his ideas.) http://scottmccloud.com/3-home/essays/2003-09-micros/micros....
Comment linking /3-home/essays/2003-09-micros/micros.html
on “Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture”Submitted My Obsession With Chess as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHaving 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 co…
Comment linking /1-webcomics/icst/icst-4/icst-4.html
on “Downpour is the game creation tool I have been working on for the past few years”Submitted The Infinite Canvas as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGood 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/ )
Comment linking /1-webcomics/icst/
on “Won’t Subscribe”Submitted Misunderstanding Micropayments (2003) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionGoogle Chrome launch comic for nostalgia: https://scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/ Also good context for why the launch of Chrome was such a big deal.
Comment linking /googlechrome/
on “Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome”Submitted Design Matters as a story · 1 points
HN discussionthe 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.
Comment linking /2-print/1-uc/index.html
on “Design Books Every Hacker Should Read”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 yo…
Comment linking /1-webcomics/icst/index.html
on “Flattr is closing down (2023)”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
Comment linking /2-print/1-uc/
on “Bret Victor Redesigns Classic Strogatz Paper (2011)”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…
Comment linking /4-inventions/triangle/index.html
on “The Absolute Denial of Shit”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
Comment linking /comics/mi/mi-25/mi-25-1.html
on “Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project”"... 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?_encodin... and push both the art and science of comics as hard as he…
Comment linking /comics/mi/mi-17/mi-17.html
on “Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project”Reminds me of Destroy!! http://www.scottmccloud.com/2-print/older/destroy/
Comment linking /2-print/older/destroy/
on “Happy 23rd Birthday, DOOM”Immediately reminded me of the Google Chrome comic http://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/
Comment linking /googlechrome/
on “1947 Imperial and Chrysler Service Book – Cam Ground Piston”It's about chess; it moves horizontally, vertically, diagonally, like moves on a chessboard. The individual panels have black and white backgrounds, like a chessboard, which combined with the movement, gives him the chance to affect the mood; if he sticks to diagonal moves on black, you get a sequence of dark, moody frames. He also wrote, in the introduction to the comic ( http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/che…
Comment linking /1-webcomics/chess/index.html
on “My Obsession with Chess”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.…
Comment linking /1-webcomics/chess/index.html
on “My Obsession with Chess”
