Clever hover text.

Today’s comic is dedicated to Jamie Noguchi, who insists that I should make this shirt:

Screen Shot 2013-07-09 at 2.17.57 PM

Thanks to everyone who came out to Anime Expo! The show was a great time, and our two Super Art Fight shows were a ton of fun. I’ll post more about those when I can. In the meantime…

Connecticon This Weekend!

That’s right! This weekend I’ll be a guest at Connecticon, where The System first premiered five years ago. A fifth anniversary of awesomeness. So be sure to come visit my table and say hello, I’ll have more information in tomorrow’s post.

Also stay tuned for a very special update about the first ever BOOK OF SYSTEM COMICS! I’m just waiting on the Kickstarter approval…

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Ross Nover – A Dose of Design Inspiration from Comic Strips from Refresh DC on Vimeo.

Earlier this week I gave what might be the most Ross-like talk I could possibly think of. It’s all about what designers can learn from their cousins the comic artists. I got to touch on some points like closure, verbal/visual pairings, art as exercise, and poop jokes. I’m really happy with how it went and so happy to see it online!

It was a part of Refresh DC, which is a group of my peers of designers and developers in the DC area. I’m pretty proud of it and was honored to be able to speak at such an event.

I tried to make it as accessible as I could to designers and non-designers, and also give credit where it’s due. With that in mind, thanks to Olly MossCaldwell TannerDanielle CorsettoJamie NoguchiSteve NapierskiAnanth Pasdlfkjksjdf;jRandal MunroeShannon WheelerFrank Chimero3eanuts and Garfield Minus GarfieldAlex RobinsonJeph JacquesJessica HischeCarolyn SewellNoah ScalinAustin Kleon, my friends at Super Art Fight, the American University Design Program (whose resources evolved into this presentation), and Scott McCloud. (Did I miss anyone?)

The audio is passable, but the exposure kills the projector so you may have to follow along in the SlideShare (this is the link to that).

If you watch any or all of it, let me know what you think! And if you are looking for someone to talk about comics and design, just let me know.

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A little history. Four years and a week and a half ago, I started my comic thanks to two great pieces of advice from my friends Jami Noguchi and Marty Day:

  1. Shut up.
  2. F*cking do it.

At the time, I thought I needed to step back, make a logo, make a website, make it pretty, and all that stuff before launching. Instead, I installed WordPress inside the folder of another site I had, and just started making comics. This was brilliantly stupid. Brilliant because it made me shut up, stop thinking about it, and get started. And stupid because for years the site had odd naming issues (is it Not Quite Wrong? Rosscott Inc? The System? System Comic?), a really long URL, and looked pretty standard-ComicPress-y. Unlike Scott Kurtz, I think ComicPress is a perfectly fine way to get started, but it is a standard template and like any standard templates, can be outgrown.

I outgrew mine a while ago.

Flash forward to last year, when I wrote a rather monumentous post on the site called “Finite Canvas, Better Frame”. As a web designer, it was dumb of me to have such a bad website, especially for a comic about web design. So, after a lot of thinking, I began working on what you now see here which is a better way of reading comics. Boom. Yeah, I said it. What?

We need a better way of reading comics because the way comic sites work needs to change with the Internet. As Jakob Nielsen says, you’re not just competing with others in your field, but every other site on the web. And comics need to catch up to that. When the term “webcomics” gets used, half of that gets quickly forgotten. You can’t be a webcomic artist without a website, and it’s time we started having that half of things catch up. This site is an experiment in usability, featuring a lot of tools to help users better interact with the comics shown and it’s all built on ComicPress.

So why is this a better way of reading comics? Let’s go through some features, shall we?

Left-hand navigation. Never again will you go searching for the comic’s navigation buttons, or have them move around on you when a comic is long or short. They are always right left there, no matter what. Like a mother watching over you. So you can now effectively read every comic without moving your mouse.

More ways to dive in. There is related content all over the place. Like a comic about coffee? Want to see more about coffee? NO PROBLEM. Check out ALL THE POSTS ON THE SITE ABOUT COFFEE. Under each comic and post is now related comics/posts since over half of the traffic to the site is here for one comic they saw about design / coffee / bikes, now they can see more related comics about coffee / bikes / design. Oh, and not just ONE, but TWO archive pages! Check it. Browse by subject or browse by comic date.

Infinite scroll. Go to the home page, and scroll to the bottom. You’ll have the main comic at the top, and then some mixture of recent blog posts and comics. And at the bottom? MORE POSTS. They just keep loading and loading. It’s just like Tumblr’s ultra-addictive and dangerous dashboard. But better (because it has my comics in it).

Archive diving made easy. Are you new to the site? Haven’t read all the comics but don’t want to click through page after page of comics and wait for it to load? What if all the comics were on one page that I could just scroll down and read through? WELL NOW YOU CAN. Welcome, friends and Systemics, to the Turbo Reader™. Go to the archive pages and just use the sidebar to pick which comic you’d like to start with, and whether or not you’re reading forwards or backwards in the archive. You’ll get all the comics you want and none of those pesky “news posts” that you just don’t read anyway.

Responsive Design. Resize this browser window. I dare you. Did it break things? Honestly, probably a little. But it also resized to fit your browser, didn’t it? Isn’t that neat?

If you’re interested in moving your own comic site forward, let me know. I’m trying to blaze a trail, but there’s no reason to go it alone. If you want to talk shop, ping me at systemcomic at gmail dot com. Otherwise, stay tuned. I’m planning on launching some initiatives to make some of these tools available for others. We all need to catch up and move forward.

So there you go, a quick overview to the new site. Obviously, I think it’s a rather staggering improvement, but I couldn’t have done it alone, so some thank yous:

  • To Lori Goldberg (TwitterWebsite), who programmed the whole thing into WordPress, everyone go give her money. (Female programmers! Yay!)
  • To my friends who heard me complain about this process for the past year or so, thank you.
  • To my comic friends who told me to shut up and fucking do it, thanks. Now onto the book.
  • To Carter, who almost programmed the site and started work on the Turbo Reader with me, thanks man. Sorry it didn’t pan out, but it was some solid work that needed to be done to yield the final result.
  • Ryan McCahan of Blind Ferret, who did some late-night .htaccess breaking and fixing. And Justin Boyd as well, who lent a hand!

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This past weekend, the Super Art Fight gang went to Webcomics Con, and due to the wedding of a very close friend, I couldn’t attend. In my stead, they held the SUPER ART FIGHT: ROSS NOVER MEMORIAL CUP tournament. One of the bouts, Nick “Ghostfreehood” Borkowicz versus the Internet’s own Chris “Dr. McNinja” Hastings. has found it’s way online. If you’ve never seen how SAF looks, this is a good example (though without the gigantic stadium-sized audience we normally have). Some of the best improv art and comedy we’ve ever had.

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Internet homie (and known Systemic) Lee Cherolis is no stranger to The System. In fact, he did two guest comics for The System a while back that can still be found in the archives here and here. Recently, he and Ed Cho started a new comic called Little Guardians, which is a wonderfully illustrated and written webcomic that is just starting to get really interesting.

Recently, somewhat in reference to my sick week, they referenced The System in one of their posts. I cut out a snippet above, but there’s more to it than that. You’ll have to go to the post to read it (here is that post). The post is even called “Novier Cave Paintings”, a nice touch.

As much as I want you to see the reference, make sure to check out their comic, from the beginning, here.

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So it looks like my fellow webtoonist friends from Dear Pirate, Commissioned Comic and Hello with Cheese have some celebrating to do! They’ve been picked up by Wizards of the Coast to do a series of comics, which appears to be updating on Fridays. The first is on random encounters, the rest we will have to wait and see.

I’m proud to say I helped introduce these two fellows at Connecticon a few years ago, and everything they post together gives me a few ounces of pride. Unfortunately no royalty check.

GO CHECK OUT THE COMIC »

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The following is something I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s not a final thought, merely something I’ve been pondering that I thought I’d share.

Some of you may or may not know, I have recently been hosting The Webcomic Beacon Newscast. It’s a discussion news roundup of the week’s comics news, with as much webcomic stuff as we can find to cover. Mostly it winds up being about plenty of other things, but recently we got on the topic of innovation in comics (you can listen here if you like). Somewhere in the middle, I started ranting about one place webcomics really need innovation: the “web” part.

↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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Will my webcomic get me laid? (Guest chart by Jessica Hagy)

Thanks to the amazing Jessica Hagy, creator of the truly amazing Indexed, a site full of fun and interesting charts less about numbers and more about relationships. I had a chance to meet up with Jessica at SXSW a few weeks ago and, after a rather poignant conersation, she decided to make this chart. Want to know the minute I knew me and Jessica were going to be friends? She’s embraced my motto:

It couldn’t come at a better time! As I mentioned the other day on The Tweepers, I was in a bike accident on Sunday and beyond any physical damage (stitches in my chin and a severe blow to my pride) I’m playing catch-up all this week. Those comic remixes I asked for a little while ago will be making an appearance this week, as will some guest comics from friends and colleagues.

Btw Nerds, where you at?

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Over at the site Archive Crawl, they reviewed The System. While the overall review did not love the comic, it features this amazing quote:

If you find yourself with excess time that needs to be legally disposed of, you could do a lot worse.

I think that’s going on the book jacket.

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I don’t know how many of you guys have read Jonathan Rosenberg’s work in the past, but if you haven’t, you should.* For 13 years he has done the webcomic Goats, which has become a cult classic amongst its fans. The story kept growing and growing, starting with some slackers at a bar and now taking place amongst multiple universes with 13 years of back story.

Now Goats is a great comic with T-Shirts and books for sale, but Jon realized something recently: It wasn’t going to turn out like he planned. Goats as a property was never going to get to the levels of stability and income he needed, and he needed a new project. You can read a good interview with Jon and all that juiciness here. As of Monday, that project has launched.

It’s called Scenes from the Multiverse, and it’s a bunch of one-off strip-style comics taking place amongst amoebae, odd aliens, and tongue-like things.  By design it’s quick to jump into, and you can tell by reading Rosenberg is having a lot of fun with the change of pace.

So go check it out and show your support. Tell him Rosscott sent you.

Side note: I’m honored to say that when I met Jon (briefly at Webcomics Weekend last year and again at SPX) he actually had read The System. It’s always great to hear someone whom you respect respects you right back.

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