I had assumed Twitter was using designs it had paid for for its Fail page, but apparently not. Courtesy of John Wilson’s comment on my last blog about Twitter, a couple of hours ago, came news the famous whale is a stock shot from here.
Yiying Lu is the fantastic designer behind the image we all see, and love, so much. Frankly I think Twitter should use more of their work to give us some variety, and also give Yiying a lot more credit. How about a service sleeping owl?
With respect to celebrating downtime here is a link to the Fail Whale Fan Club (“Celebrating Twitter and our favorite error page cetacean“), funnily enough it seems it was started by someone I follow, Sean O’Steen. I love the fact Tom Limongello sent the Twitter team t-shirts!
He told them:
FailWhale is quickly becoming a brand, and that is a very good thing. Twitter has proven that it does a great job of bridging the online world to the physical world, in fact it’s better than any service I’ve ever used. I wore my FailWhale t-shirt at Internet Week in NYC and that simple test returned an immediately favorable response. I wanted to help the FailWhale succeed as a symbol, even though what it represents has not been completely defined (also a good thing, because you can define this to benefit Twitter’s image as a service that supports all of its users).
Perhaps one day we’ll be able to rename it the Scale Whale… but I am not going to hold my breath. Best of all- guess who is now on twitter… Yiying. Subscribed. I must admit I am thinking about Greenmonk logo possibilities… Certainly Yiying is now going to win a lot of work based on Twitter’s use of the image, which is GREAT, and proves the value of open content. There are so many great angles to this story. A community taking control of the brand, an artist creating a visual language that defines the way we talk about a service, the celebration of downtime that I mentioned earlier…
The Fail Whale is a classic social object. I wonder what Hugh MacLeod will make of it.
I think a lot of web people are going to start using Yiying’s art. I know its now on the agenda as an image source for a chinposin Friday. To Whit To Who.
Jen Robinson says:
June 27, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Great post, James! Love the references, and good call on social object status. It certainly is! I’m the newest fan on FB.
Tim Walker says:
June 27, 2008 at 2:44 pm
It’s been interesting to see the appopriation of the Fail Whale as a CafePress t-shirt design and so on. In my view, it’s *good* news for Twitter in that it builds their brand. You don’t go to the trouble to pay homage to a fail screen unless you *care* about the thing that’s failing.
Stilgherrian says:
June 28, 2008 at 12:41 am
You will be pleased to know that there’s now a Wikipedia entry for Fail Whale, a competition to design a beer label for Fail Whale Pale Ale, and plans for a global for Fail Whale Pale Ale Tasting Day in September 2008.
Deadly Bloody Serious » Blog Archive » Hello, Yiying! The creator of the “Fail Whale” says:
June 30, 2008 at 1:18 am
[…] James Governor had written an article “The Designer Who Gave Us Fail Whale and Showing The Whale”: I had assumed Twitter was using designs it had paid for for its Fail page, but apparently not. […]
friarminor says:
July 15, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Used to really hate it but with the cute balaena designs now I’m actually looking forward to more Twitter outages.
Narcissistic.
@MobyDick
Luv the designs really.