Design Meme

I’ve always found the concept of the Infinite Canvas, as defined by Scott McCloud very interesting… but I think it needs a little refining.

Scott’s version of the Infinite Canvas relies on user interaction to scroll/zoom panels of a comic into view. Really, this isn’t much different from a regular webpage which can be as long or wide as an author wants and requires the user to scroll about to read the contents of the page on their screen.

The truly revolutionary aspect of the web isn’t that you can have very, very long pages – it’s that your pages can be linked to other pages. Clicking a link to further content is just another type of user interaction – like scrolling or zooming, and is in some ways analogous to turning a page in a book.

If you have a daily webcomic that you’ve been running 5 days a week for several years, you can allow your users to click through hundreds of pages in your archive. What’s more, when the characters in your strip make reference to something that happened in an earlier strip… you could actually link right to it. Taking this one step further, if your strip features cameos by characters in other strips – or even better – the storyline crosses over with the storyline in someone else’s comic, you could link directly to that as well.

The real Infinite Canvas isn’t a fancy Flash viewer that lets you scroll about a big image on your screen. It’s the web itself, and the links you can create between content.