Understanding Google

Monday, 1 September 2008 — 5:02pm | Comics, Computing

Tomorrow, Google is launching Google Chrome, their WebKit-based open-source browser. Interesting, but not as interesting as how they announced it: a 38-page comic book by Scott McCloud, which explains what Chrome does and how it works. It’s a good read for anyone who wants an insight into web browser architecture, even if you only have a basic comprehension of software design.

For those of you who don’t know, Scott McCloud is the author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, which is, alongside Will Eisner’s more instructionally oriented Comics and Sequential Art, the canonical primer to comic-book semiotics. So he brings his whole arsenal of frame-breaking layout tricks to the table, and the whole endeavour embodies a kind of documentarian character; you get the sense that Google is a magic workshop where the products are so omnipresent by design that that the elves have to tinker from the inside out.

More to the point, it’s educational. I learned a lot about browsers today.

My question: can McCloud do this for every major Google project? Pretty please?

Previous:
Next:

submit to reddit