Artist Yiying Lu Finds Success Through Twitter's Fail Whale
Yiying Lu is the Australian artist who designed a whale image that became known as Fail Whale because it was used by the microblogging service Twitter during periods when the site was not working well. Twitter suffered lots of downtime early last year and the whale image was so prevalent that Twitter users started calling it Fail Whale. Twitter had purchased the whale image as a stock photo from iStockPhoto.com but Twitter users loved the image so much that they tracked down the original artist, Yiying Lu. The New York Timessays the popularity of Fail Whale helped brand Lu as an artist and helped her sell a few thousand dollars worth of Fail Whale merchandise. It also helped her land new clients.
Lu was flattered to learn about her illustration's quasi-icon status, she says, but of course a stock image's popularity does not translate directly into revenue. (She has since removed it from iStockPhoto.) The T-shirt stunt ended up being a kind of branding event for the artist. Limongello figures the number of tweets, blog posts and other online info-bursts must have numbered in the tens of thousands. This helped Lu to sell a few thousand dollars’ worth of whaled T-shirts, mugs and prints through Zazzle.com and other services. She also got a lot more attention from design and illustration clients. "It fits Twitter's brand so well," Lu says. "I don't know if it’s fate or a coincidence."
Yiying Lu also sells some cute greeting cards from her website, like the ones pictured below.
