Design of xkcd.com

The four main sections of the xkcd.com website.

The design of xkcd.com includes four white sections, which are separated by a thin black border and a light blue-gray background color. All text on the page uses a small caps font, except for the word "xkcd" in the logo image. Here is a list of the changes that have been made:

The design has changed many times over the years, but mainly in the beginning. Prior to October 24th, 2004, the website didn't mention the name "xkcd" and didn't include any comics. During that time, the site's message simply stated: "I don't use this page for much. It goes un-updated for a long time, and I don't really change the content, though I'm thinking of putting together a good links page. For now I just mostly use this to host pictures.". Before October 18th, 2005, the website was redesigned to be used to host xkcd comics. Between July 6th, 2006 and July 10th, 2006, the design of the website changed dramatically to one very similar to the current one.

Links section

Main article: Links

The first section is for the links and is positioned at the top left of the page. It contains direct links to navigate around xkcd.com, his social accounts, and his books. There have been many changes to the links over the course of the site's history, with the last one being made in 2023. It states:

Archive

What If?

About

Feed•Email

TW•FB•IG

-Books-

What If? 2

WI?•TE•HT

Header section

The second section is the header, which contains the logo, the tagline, and the header text. The header is wider than the first section but has the same height. The xkcd logo is positioned on the upper left corner and serves as a clickable link to the front page. The image used in the logo of xkcd is from the first panel of 77: Bored with the Internet, showing only the characters and the chair and the desk with a now old fashioned computer screen. The color of the text in the logo is a shade of grey/gray(spelling varies with location), with a hex value of #6e7b91, and an rgba value of (110,123,145,255).

Tagline

Main article: Tagline

Next to the logo is the tagline, a short text that appears regardless of which comic is being viewed. There have been eight taglines displayed over the course of the site's history, with the current one being added in 2006. It states:

A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

Header text

Main article: Header text

The header text is usually updated when Randall has news to share or wants to add information about a specific comic. The header text has been changed more than a hundred times since the launch of xkcd.com. The standard header text states:

xkcd updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Comic section

This section of the website is dedicated to displaying comics.

Comic

Positioned above the comic is the title, presented in large and bold lettering. Just below the title, but above the primary comic image, there are five buttons. They follow a fairly standard layout: on the outer edges are the

|<

and

>|

arrows, which transport the user to the first or most recent comic accordingly. Adjacent to these are the

< Prev

and

Next >

buttons, allowing navigation between the comics immediately before and after the currently displayed one. In instances where the displayed comic is the first or the last, attempting to access the previous or next comic will simply result in the page being reloaded. At the center there is a

Random

button, which, when clicked, loads a comic at random. The same set of buttons is duplicated below the comic as well. While this redundancy isn't needed in most comics, it ensures that the buttons are conveniently accessible both before and after scrolling, especially for large comics.

Finally, beneath this second row of buttons, two links are provided. The first functions as a permalink, directly linking to the comic currently displayed on the page. In some cases, custom permalinks are used for various versions of the same comic, such as in some of the interactive comics like 1350: Lorenz and 1663: Garden. The structure of this link consists solely of the xkcd.com domain followed by the respective comic number. For instance, the link for comic 3000: Experimental Astrophysics would appear as: "https://www.xkcd.com/3000/". The second link leads to the image URL suitable for hotlinking or embedding, in this case "https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/experimental_astrophysics.png". This link is stored within a comics-specific logical subdirectory of the server. The filenames of these images typically align with the comic titles, although exceptions arise, particularly in cases of title conflicts or when the visible comic is dynamically generated or a composite rendering.

This is one of 65 incomplete explanations: This page was created recently in ROBOTIC MODE. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

In this April Fool's Day comic, several new viewing modes have been added to the xkcd website, accessible through a drop-down list beneath the comic (not visible on Explain xkcd). This allows various different viewing experiences for the entire website, including older comics. Some are "normal" viewing modes, like the typical "light" and "dark" modes, but others take such things further and/or in more esoteric ways. This includes an "airplane mode" (see below) that parodies and subverts the normal implementation.

The accompanying comic references one of the first lines of the Bible (Genesis 1:3), wherein God creates light. Here, though, before God has a chance to fully appreciate the work, a person on Earth immediately requests an implementation of dark mode. Dark mode is a feature on many websites and devices which displays text in white against a black background instead of the default black text on a white background. In low ambient light this makes for a less intense viewing experience that is easier on the eyes, so many people who spend a lot of time looking at screens prefer dark mode (whereas casual users often find light mode easier to read). On OLED screens, another benefit is that because of the primarily low brightness of the screen, less battery life is consumed, which makes it useful for those who want to be energy-efficient or extend their battery life.

This demand represents a common experience for web and app designers, who spend a lot of time creating something that looks beautiful to them, and in their particular use case, only to find when it is put out into the wild that it doesn't suit the needs of many of their actual users, who don't particularly care about the effort they've put in.

Dark mode is not usually implemented on planets,^{[citation needed]} although one could argue that night-time is effectively Earth's "dark mode", which could have been created by God as a response to the person. (That seems likely, in fact, given that the very next words in Genesis 1:4 are "and he separated the light from the darkness".) The comic deviates somewhat from traditional Judeo-Christian theology, as in Genesis the day/night cycle was created on the first day, but humans were created on the sixth day - thus, the "dark mode" (night-time) would already have been implemented by the time humans existed. Possibly the person is actually requesting a dark mode that can be toggled at will, rather than one which occurs automatically each day.

Unlike most comics, the title text contains no jokes, but rather explains the update and gives basic instructions.

The comic credits the "Excellent Design Team", consisting of Amber, Benjamin Staffin, and Kevin who helped create the modes.

List Of Modes

Light Mode

The usual site experience. Typically, where sites have light and dark modes, light is the default option, so as to mimic ink on paper (such as printed newspaper comic strips).

Lighter Mode

The entire web page is filtered to look overexposed, making colors wash out and reducing the contrast.

Dark Mode

A standard "white content on black background" dark mode. Specifically, Dark Mode inverts the colors of the page (which makes a colour-negative and then hue-rotates it by 180 degrees (to make hue return to normal, only brightness-reversed. (For example, see comic 556, with dark mode enabled, to see how the hue is maintained.) The background of the page, normally light blue, becomes a dark blue; (near-)whites become (near-)blacks, and vice-versa, only mid-tones staying the same. This inversion makes the content of this particular comic, with the original transition from a dark pane to "let there be light" panes and the subsequent request for this very feature, particularly nonsensical, as it seems to start fully bright, then darken as God creates light.

Darkest Mode

Everything on the webpage turns completely black (severely 'underexposed', in effect, the opposite to "Lighter mode" but also even more extreme). The exception is the drop down menu widget, which may appear as merely a dark gray — and depending upon the browser itself, the dropped-down menu may be its 'natural' appearance when it becomes fully active — which is of course extremely helpful for navigating back out of this mode or onward onto others.

Blurry Mode

Blurs the entire webpage. This is not conventionally desirable as it makes it harder to read text and interpret visuals. Whereas light and dark mode support can improve accessibility for certain vision conditions, this mode makes already poor vision even worse.

Grayscale Mode

Applies a standard grayscale/desaturation conversion filter to the entire webpage. Many devices provide a grayscale mode as one of their color filter settings, which can simulate different color vision deficiencies. Grayscale specifically can also help improve focus by preventing colors from catching the eye and making distractions less visually appealing.

Greyscale Mode

Operates identically to Grayscale Mode, but also changes the spelling of "math" in the slogan at the top of the page to "maths" (to go along with the respective British English use of gray/grey).

Dorian Greyscale Mode

Makes the webpage slowly turn grey, including darkening/fading-to-grey 'white' areas. This refers to The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the titular character has a portrait that slowly ages and fades out while the character stays young and handsome. The transformation finishes after 5 minutes.

Of note is that the surname of the titular character is "Gray" (as is still common, if not dominant, in Britain), but the mode itself is named for the primary British/non-American standard English version of the word for such a hueless shade.

No relation to the Dorian mode, a musical scale.

Space Opera Mode

Turns the entire page into a Star Wars-style opening scroll, which loops round until you change the mode. Scrolling the mouse scrolls up or down through the page content. Space opera is a genre of sci-fi that Star Wars falls under.

3D Mode

Makes the comic render in anaglyphic stereoscopy. Randall has used 3D space before for another joke comic.

Origami Mode

Rotates and folds various pieces of the webpage, as if it were origami-folded.

Ink Mode

Recolors the webpage as if drawn in blue ink, which is often used for the initial roughing-out of a drawing.

Spring Mode

Gives the comic a simple physics simulation, making it slightly rotate around an axis when the page is scrolled, and giving it a springboard look, hence the name. The axis around which the page precesses is perpendicular to the axis the user scrolls on. This means that when the page is scrolled vertically (the usual direction), the comic wobbles around a horizontal axis, but when scrolled horizontally (if your screen size or zoom allows it), the comic precesses about the vertical axis.

Antipodes Mode

Turns the entire webpage upside down. An antipode is the point on the Earth's surface directly opposite of another, but "The Antipodes" is also a term used to refer to Australia and New Zealand by inhabitants of the northern hemisphere. Note: When the comic was first published this was labeled "Southern Hemisphere Mode".

Hacker Mode

Recolors the entire webpage in the stereotypical green-on-black coding environment color scheme often used by hackers on film and TV. This visual shorthand is a holdover from early monochrome monitors that used P1 phosphor. (Modern terminal software has no such limitations, and many programmers today use syntax highlighting to color-code operators and keywords.)

Screensaver Mode

Makes the comic float around on the webpage, bouncing as it hits the edges. A common type of screensaver has some text or other element drifting around the screen in this way. Many people ended up watching such screensavers, waiting for the bouncing graphic to hit the corner of the screen. Like with Hacker Mode, there is an element of nostalgia to this; screensavers are less necessary on modern LCD screens, so fewer setups use them.

Modem Mode

Slowly reveals the comic from top to bottom, as if slowly loading (but only in approximation) the way images often used to have to be progressively rendered from a low-rate stream of image data in the days of more limited dial-up connections and also a lower-performance Internet backbone in general. This is accompanied by audio of the sound of a modem communicating over such a connection. NB - this mode does not appear to function correctly/reliably for some viewers.

Stained Glass Mode

Fills each closed area of the comic with a separate color to mimic the look of stained glass imagery. The colors vary each time this mode is selected or the page is reloaded in this mode, which works by flooding a single pseudorandom hue over all areas of near-white, each flood bounded only by any sufficiently dark or saturated drawn line/border.

Airplane Mode

Makes the comic fly around on the page, with the onomatopoeia "NYOOM!" written next to it, as if it were an airplane. This is unlike the usual use of airplane mode to refer to disabling the cellphone (or all radio frequency) features of a mobile device, as required on most flights. Of course, the website's "Airplane Mode" does no such thing, and would be pointless to enable on an airplane.^{[citation needed]}

Boat Mode

Makes the entire webpage tilt back and forth, emulating the way a boat rolls on the water. While extremely unlikely, this could theoretically counteract the rocking motion of a boat, stabilizing the page content. In practice, it is unlikely to help with seasickness. (As of 2024, some smart devices started offering a "vehicle motion cues" feature that is meant to reduce motion sickness, although it is designed for road vehicles rather than watercraft.)

This mode is a reference to the longstanding mention of a Boat Mode in the footnote, which says "Remove your device from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode".

The two links were originally plaintext and couldn't be clicked, but they were changed to hyperlinks between July 31, 2021 and Aug 10, 2021.

Permanent link to this comic:

https://xkcd.com/3000/

Image URL (for hotlinking/embedding):

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/experimental_astrophysics.png

Title text

Main article: Title text

The title text is an HTML attribute that Randall puts on almost every xkcd comic to add something tangentially relevant to the topic of the comic. Over the years, its purpose has changed.

Bottom section

Footer comics

Main article: Footer comics

The footer comics are likely selected for representing the topics covered on xkcd. There have been five changes to the footer comics over the course of the site's history, with the last one being added in 2019. They are:

150: Grownups	730: Circuit Diagram	162: Angular Momentum	688: Self-Description	556: Alternative Energy Revolution
1732: Earth Temperature Timeline

Feeds

Below the footer comics, there are three feeds links. These links consist of a RSS feed, an Atom feed, and, starting from February 6th, 2019, a subscription link for receiving news via email. On June 11th, 2019, the last two links were also added to the links at the top for easier access. They are:

RSS Feed - Atom Feed - Email

Comics I enjoy

Beneath the two feeds there is a list of Randall's favorite webcomics with links:

Comics I enjoy:

Three Word Phrase,

SMBC,

Dinosaur Comics,

Oglaf (nsfw),

A Softer World,

Buttersafe,

Perry Bible Fellowship,

Questionable Content,

Buttercup Festival,

Homestuck,

Junior Scientist Power Hour

Other things

Main article: Other things

The Other things section on xkcd contains links to external websites Randall finds interesting. It is displayed beneath the Comics I enjoy section. There has been a total of five links displayed over the course of the site's history, which have been changed thrice.

Other things:

Tips on technology and government,

Climate FAQ, Katharine Hayhoe

Warning

Main article: Warning

The warning on xkcd served as a humorous advisory message to users about the contents of the comics. It was originally added to the site in 2006, but it was removed in 2016. It stated:

Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

Bitcoin address

Main article: Bitcoin address

The Bitcoin address on xkcd used to be included in the footnote and in xkcd.com/bitcoin. A larger version of the Bitcoin address is available in the main article. He updated the addresses frequently, using them as a modern tip jar for high-tech users. There have been six Bitcoin addresses displayed over the course of the site's history, with the last one being removed, alongside the footnote, in 2016. It stated:

BTC 1FhCLQK2ZXtCUQDtG98p6fVH7S6mxAsEey

Footnote

Main article: Footnote

The footnote on xkcd is set to a very tiny font size, which makes it hard to read without zooming in. A larger version of the footnote is available in the main article. There have been two major footnotes displayed over the course of the site's history, with the current one being added in 2016. It states:

xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS

at a screen resolution of 1024x1. Please enable your ad blockers, disable high-heat drying, and remove your device

from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode. For security reasons, please leave caps lock on while browsing.

License and copyright

Randall allows people to use his comics for free as long as they do not make money on them and as long as they credit him with the work. There are two notes:

"More details" is a link to xkcd.com/license.html, which expands on what people are and are not allowed to do.