I am super-grateful that Randall Munroe replied to my IRC ping and gave his permission for us to use an xkcd strip as the basis for the WordCamp San Francisco shirts. You all know how much I love working on WC shirt designs (2 years in NYC, 1 in Savannah), so working on this one was an extra treat. #867 was one of my first choices, since it’s conference based. I changed herpetologists and ornithologists to developers and bloggers, and wrote some replacement text. Chelsea Otakan turned the PNG into a vector and used a fan-created font to approximate the look of real xkcd text. Mike Ritchey at High Voltage Productions (formerly Lo-fi Custom), who works with a lot of WordCamps on custom shirt printing, did some adjusting to make sure it would be legible. They’re being printed right now on sweatshop-free tees in a cheerful, summery blue color. And here is the WCSF2011 shirt art:
Jen (aka Jane) on WordPress 
Everything is better with stick figures! Awesome shirt, can’t wait to wear the shirt.
Jane,
I’m disappointed to see the woman in the modified cartoon is portrayed as not understanding what she’s talking about vs the original comic http://xkcd.com/867.
In the original comic, she is presenting at a conference and stating she believes a certain species should be reclassified. In the WordPress one, she is saying something works but has no idea how it does (but it must work because everyone agrees it does).
Did you consider the statements the characters were making and how their gender and power placement before creating this?
The female presenter look like a total ditz. And even if it were true that she was, it’s the responsibility of organizations to ensure positive (or neutral) messages about gender in the workplace are promoted; not ones that reinforce stereotypes.
Had to put my $0.02 in on this one because I’m a long time WordPress user, will be attending Wordcamp SF next week, am a fan of xkcd comics and Randall plus truly enjoyed Randall’s Google+ discussion on women / society’s treatment of women and public gender disclosure https://plus.google.com/111588569124648292310/posts/SeBqgN9Zoiu
Um, I thought they were both women. Why do you assume the dev track person is male? Why do you assume the dev track person is more knowledgeable? In this cartoon, BOTH sides are saying something intentionally ridiculous, and gender is irrelevant (as they both appear female to me). The fact that you jumped to those conclusions makes me sad for about a hundred reasons, and I hope others will back me on it. For the record, the dev track person has my exact haircut/color now (WC Fayetteville peeps can confirm) and the blogger track person has my exact haircut/color for the previous year (every other WC’s peeps, ditto). And I’m a woman, for anyone that doesn’t know.
The point is that *both* sides are making statements that are heard over and over again at WordCamps and in community discussions. It’s self-mocking, with great love for my community and intended to point out that the self-imposed division between “bloggers” and “developers” is at its root silly.
If anything, by showing that both tracks have women on the dais — and putting them there in the real life conference program — I’m arguably thinking more about gender and power placement here than you are giving me credit for. Way to be supportive.
The tshirt is awesome – great job Jane! 🙂
Some people need to lighten up and get a sense of humor. I’m a woman and I wasn’t offended in the least!
I too thought they’re both women. In fact, as a regular XKCD reader, I have grown to note that only women have long hair in the comic (which makes sense, since stick boobies don’t work so well…).
And as Jane said both women were being ‘ignorant’ on some level (content doesn’t matter to SEO is incorrect, hello!), which is hilarious.
If you’re stuck on the ‘OMG! a woman looks like a ditz!’ then you’re concentrating too much on the less important thing, IMO. Obviously the most important thing is that beer is free. (This is a JOKE!)
(Jane, please tell me you’ll sell these shirts for people who can’t make WCSF? Plleeeease?)
Seconded – I’d gladly pay for one of these. We can haz WCSF shirts too? 😀
In fact, the one on the right has the same hair as the one with breast cancer.
They could also both be men, some men like to wear their hair long. Not that it matters.
True! That could easily be @dd32 in the blogger track, but I doubt he’d be pimping SEO. 🙂
@Jane welll.. As soon as I saw the male vs female item come up i thought to myself “Hey, That could easily be me in the Bloggers track..”
But you’re right, You’ll never get me pimping SEO to a bloggers audience! (Well, If i was, the 2nd paragraph of the 2nd frame would be along the lines of “And as you can see, Design is actually irrelevant to the SEO Optimised content you create!”)
I see yin and yang – two sides to the content vs dev conflict. I’ve run a WordPress user group for years – this argument goes back to WordPress’s early days – in fact it pre-dates WordPress.
I think it’s a great strip and a perfect comment on WordCamps & the tension (healthy tension that keeps us on our toes) between tracks.
I don’t see a gender issue in this at all, especially given everything Jane mentions.
My $0.02 is this should be a hair color battle, I vote for everyone shaving their head, then what? Forget expression.
Even better, we should re-introduce the West Coast/East Coast Gangster Rap battle and start shooting each other at WordCamps, maybe wear red and blue bandanas? Jane, can you rework the image?
Some folks like to take the fun out of everything!
I think it is a great characterization of what we see at WordCamps Jane, and you guys/gals did a great job.
See you next week 🙂
The idea was not to identically replicate the comic, but rather to make a version of it that applied well to the conference it was being made for. I think Jane did a phenomenal job.
I’m with everyone else that the gender here plays no part. I too thought they were both women, but in the end I don’t think it particularly matters. What matters is that they represent the epitome of both WordPress user and WordPress developer. Both are wrong and that’s point. To me it showcases that there is a happy medium to be found, by exemplifying the two extremes.
Why am I not surprised this has gone in this direction
Jane – it’s fine 🙂
In my opinion:
a) both figures actually are gender neutral, as thankfully we see no stick-figure genitalia. Hopefully we’ve all moved beyond the days of classifying gender by hairstyle!
b) if you are assigning gender to the figure in the last panel, then apparently all men are incapable of thinking about actual content and only see the code that make it possible to post content 😉
I’m all for gender-equality…I proudly wear the feminist label. But there are times, I’m afraid, when too much meaning is assigned to what is, after all, two gender-ambiguous stick figures making a very funny and painfully accurate observation about (some) devs vs. (some) users.
It’s Awesome!!!!
I loved it.
I clearly fall on the developer side, am definitely male, and could imagine that exact diagram at the center of any talk I gave.
Having just attended WordCamp Boston last week, this was both timely and accurate in addition to being funny.
Our t-shirt was grade-school gym class grey. (But I am wearing it today anyway)
I think someone needs a hug.
They’re both women, their words are ridiculous and the design is awesome. Great job Jane.
I’d love to leave this silliness behind and refocus the convo on HOW FREAKING COOL the shirts are!!! Going to love on mine:) thanks J, for being so inventive and not just throwing the logo on there.
That’s seven different kinds of awesome, Jane. I’m sorry to see that Adria mis-interpreted (she writes/speaks a lot on gender unbalance in tech, so I think she has a predisposition to look at things from that angle?) Personally, the genders of the speakers didn’t matter to me. I just saw the “Blogger” and “Developer” designations, combined with what they were saying (being caricatures of those archetypes).
Wish I was going to WCSF!
This is awesome. Thanks for the hard work on this for all of us!
Jane – I LOVE my t-shirt. I especially like the fact that you chose a really nice blank for women from bella to print on. I was inspired to then buy the wp-admin T with matching zip up hoodie and the code is poetry shirt. All very flattering. It’s great to have a woman watching out for t-shirt blanks that look good (and feel good) on women. The whole conference was outstanding. I am so glad that I flew in to attend. Thank you for all your hard work.
Wearing the t-shirt. From my WCSF Flickr set:
