Lost 365 (via Systemic Manima) is an original piece of artwork devoted to Lost every day for a year. This is from Jin’s piece on day 32. Yeah, so far they’re on day 32. LINK »

Thanks to Systemic Justin for posting this one to his Twitter account. It shows the Tokyo Crowsswalk symbol going for a walk. More artsy than funny but the ending is pretty great. For more size / view options, here’s the original website as well as the Vimeo post.

How about you? Any Systemics in the Austin, TX area? Whether you’ll be at the festival or not, let me know if you’re around. Drop a line on Twitter or in the comments.

We’ve all been there, right?

It’s an even funnier comic if you just think “nudge guy” (whom I’ve decided is named Thomas) isn’t a jerk, he just has a large lag between thoughts he has and things he says.

How’s it going with the RSS ads?  If the stats are right we’re off to a good start making $2.00-$3.00 / day. Doesn’t sound like much I know, but it’s a profit. Combined with a better ad campaign that might actually start to add up. Stay tuned. Feedburner tells me we got 1,700 subscribers to the RSS (or as I like to call it, the RoSS feed). That’s awesome!

Oh and finally, an article popped up on BoingBoing today all about RSS feeds. The article is on posting full-text feeds vs. introduction-only feeds that drive traffic to the site. It’s got links to my main Mann and Daring Fireball, as well as some other interestingness. Read on if you like! LINK.

I don’t expect most of you will get this, but that makes for a wonderful teaching opportunity. Josef Müller-Brockmann was a member of the Swiss design movement. Like Massimo Vignelli (whom I almost made this comic about until I realized he, like parts of the De Stijl movement, weren’t so into the tipped composition thing) he was into simple geometry, grid formation, and fonts like Aksidenz Grotesk and Helvetica.

Anyway, there are worse posters you could put on your wall.

I’m just gonna quote the post:

Last fall a group of CCA architecture students, led by Landscape Architect David Fletcher and Rebar art and design studio shared a meal together at a local taco truck for a class assignment.  Our research seminar explored San Francisco’s food and wastesheds. Our premise was that a seemingly simple, familiar food like the taco truck taco could provide visceral insight into the connections between the systems we were exploring.

Turns out it was pretty tough. Big twist, right? Anyway, there was a talk that we already missed, but the chart is still sweet, even at the small size it’s shown. If anyone finds more about the talk let me know. LINK.

Me: (tries to visit a local restaurant’s website via iPhone)
Restaurant website: I require Flash. Fuck off.
Me: I just want to know how late you’re open.
Website: Nope.
Me: But I’m on my phone. Don’t you have a little “HTML Version” link up in the corner or something?
Website: I’m ignoring you.
Me: What if I’m on my phone because I’m out, looking for a place to eat? Didn’t that ever occur to you?
Website: Fuck entirely off.
Me: (gives up, switches to computer)

That’s just the beginning. It gets better from there. Go check it out. LINK.

Greetings again, Systemics, to another edition of System in the Wild! You send in System-style images spotted wherever to me through Twitter (@rosscott / @systemcomic) or email (systemcomic at gmail) and I post them here on the site!

First up (above) comes from Systemic Larom. We were debating whether this is a “no fellatio” sign or a more general “stay away from my crotch” sign. I vote for the latter. Somehow I made a connection to the world’s oddest game of ‘telephone’… LINK.

This next one I must unfortunately say goes unnamed, as I forgot to write down who sent it in. It was through Twitter, I remember that much. Beyond that I have no idea. Whomever it was, be sure to click the link to see WHY THE GUY IS ON FIRE. Worth it, trust me. Any IT guys out there? You’ll love this. LINK.

Finally, this last one is from ME. This comes from the A Day in the Life Conference to be held in Baltimore, MD at MICA. I’ve been asked to speak along side such people as Ellen Lupton and Other People I Don’t Know. I’ll be speaking more about my day job as a web designer than the comic things, but it’s all on the table. If you’re in the Baltimore area and like design geeking out, come join in. The magic day is April 24th. LINK.

As always, if you have things to send in that match in style to The System or are just awesome, send them over to systemcomic at gmail, or any of that other stuff I mentioned above. Until next time, Systemics!

Howdy, Systemics! I don’t know what you think goes on behind the scenes of this comic, but I’m going to try and start being a little more up front and see how that goes. Hopefully you guys appreciate seeing how things really work here either as fellow creators, voyeuristic readers, or just because you like reading crap while you’re bored at work.

Did you know I would like to make money off this comic? I know, that’s crazy talk. The first part of that comment you should realize is that right now, I don’t make money off this comic.  Sure the HilariAwesome store is available and I get a sale or two a month, but the only real revenue ever seen is when I go to conventions and get to deal things in bulk. I love doing that, but it would be great if the site at least paid for it’s own hosting, maybe even a little extra. That could really take the edge off and help justify the time I put into things around here, as well as help out with the upcoming site redesign and The System Book 1 printing costs. So I’m trying to optimize / revitalize the way I try and make some cash on the site.

No, I’m not going to start charging for the content you’re used to getting for free. But If I can find ways to get the site to pay for itself or maybe even earn me a few bucks without having to inconvenience you the reader too badly, I figure I should give it a shot. As such, today starts the Great Feed Experiment. I would like to be pretty up front about this so here are all the details:

Readership on this comic is around 3,000 - 5,000 readers a day, depending on which stat tracker I look at, what sites are linking to me, what StumbleUpon feels like doing, and what I’ve been doing to update lately. It’s been there for over 6 months and it’s a great number though I’m not a fan of the plateau. From what I understand a comic running under 2 years this is a great number. I’m certainly proud of it, though of course it would always be nice if it was growing. Unfortunately, it’s not a big enough number for web ads to really do that much good. You need orders of magnitude more in the way of readers or amazing ad networks to do anything near good money with ad traffic.

However, there’s a silver lining. For a site this size, we have a HUGE number of RSS feed subscribers. Google Reader alone shows 1,398 followers as I write this, which as far as I can tell is really big for a site this size. That’s only the Google Reader ones, not to mention people subscribing through other means. After talking it over with my internet brother from another mother Marty, I’d like to know more about it and possibly utilize it a little bit, so as of today I’m starting to run the feed through FeedBurner to better track how many people are subscribing, and adding Google Adsense to the feed. I know that Adsense is one of the worst ad networks in terms of revenue because they are so general, but it’s a start until I can get on some better networks.

If you are a subscriber through the RSS and something I’ve done in this process has effected the way you read the comic and made you want to STOP reading the comic, let me know. (systemcomic at gmail) I’d rather have readers than money hands down. (systemcomic at gmail) If it is simply messing with the way you read the comic or possibly breaking anything, let me know that too. (systemcomic at gmail) I’ve tested and it seems to all be working but I won’t know for sure until you tell me what’s going on.

Anyway, thanks for understanding and of course reading the comic. It’s often easy to forget that looking at the numbers relates to real people who have taken time every day to follow what I write / draw here, which is why I always encourage you to get in touch with me. (systemcomic at gmail) Hopefully we are all building to something together. As it says in the masthead, comics will keep being posted until morale improves.

Thanks all.  Feel free to leave any thoughts in the comments, message me on The Twitters, or email me at, you guessed it, (systemcomic at gmail).