About

I created the original version of The Cartoonist's Calculator while I was a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, from 2019 to 2021. I wrote the Calculator mostly because it was something that I wanted for my own purposes, but I made it available to my colleagues at CCS, and was pleasantly surprised when they all found it useful as well. Since then it has become more well-known than I am myself, and I'm delighted to have created something that the community finds useful.

Over the years of using the Calculator myself ("eating my own dog food" in the parlance of software development), I had many ideas for ways that it could be improved, and in December 2025 I sat down and began to rebuild it from scratch. This seemed like a simple project at first (as the first one had been) but ultimately it took many months. I wrote over a thousand lines of JavaScript, tinkered endlessly with the HTML and CSS, and eventually ended up writing a static website generator in Python as well. It was the biggest coding project I've embarked on in years.

About the author

Ivy Lynn Allie is a cartoonist and apparently a software developer from Southern New England, where she no longer lives. Her comics have appeared in her one-person anthology magazine Mirror Neuron and The Rust Belt Review . She is the editor-in-chief of the cartooning magazine Monograph and the author of a critical examination of the Myst games.

A word about web technology

The Cartoonist's Calculator is not spying on you. In a world where the vast majority of websites are trying to collect as much information as they can for the purposes of targeted advertising (or, as likely as not, something even more nefarious), it is my solemn pledge to you that this website is not doing any of those things, and will not in the future. The website uses no cookies of any kind. It stores a few small bits of information in localStorage as part of its computational process but these are per session and will be deleted by your browser when you leave the page. The scripts that power the Calculator perform all the calculations on your own computer and no information of any kind is ever sent back to my server. The Calculator does not track your usage or store any information about you.

The source code is readily available to you. Please take a look if you're curious.

Remaining work

I consider the current status of The Cartoonist's Calculator to be something of an "open beta." There are still certain things remaining to be done, namely:

Changelog

v 0.93 - April 2026
Minor style sheet improvements
v 0.92 - March 2026
More resources, some stylesheet fixes, added favicon
v 0.91 - March 2026
Stylesheet for mobile devices
v 0.9 - March 2026
Initial release.