In hunting for a blog about blogs, I came across this effort as a followed link during my search. Hugh MacLeod makes his living (currently) selling wine* for a tech-savvy South African company. He enjoys his living, though, drawing cartoons that are freely distributed through Creative Commons. His puts both of those things together in what he calls indirect marketing, which has been quite successful. The original blurb on marketing disruption is very informative and includes this gem:
Of course I can’t do it by myself. I need your complicity if it’s going to work. No complicity, no idea-virus. I can’t just write a big media company a cheque and make the marketing problem go away. Those days are gone.
So the hooks are things like free art and samples of product. The ROI is the interest of people prepared and willing to publish unique perspectives on the thing that ultimately makes Hugh his money. In the process, it feeds his life work — drawing stuff about stuff.
It was the artwork that drew me into the site enough to poke around. Not because I thought it was any better than the work of other cartoonists, but because it reminded me of Erik‘s custom business cards that he took to CHI2005. For someone who has never had a good business card experience, I was jealous of that twist, which both personalized his identity and probably was a nice diversion from all the pressures of grad school studies. This isn’t quite the same schtick, but that was what made GapingVoid.com sticky for me. Elsewhere in his blog, Hugh writes about his artistic work:
The best cartoons are the ones that give you these amazing moments of clarity as you draw them. That’s the best thing about cartooning, really. Everything else seems rather secondary in comparison.
Hugh has a page of personal favorites with liner notes (and a wee bit of profanity). More importantly to my colleagues, Hugh has a nice post on creativity that includes the following: “Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.” That list is worth a blog series all it’s own.
1 reply on “GapingVoid.com”
[…] From the Drafts list of unfinished posts comes a look at Hugh MacLeod’s contemplations on creativity. Hugh is the guy behind GapingVoid.com, which I wrote about earlier this fall. He provides a lot of commentary on each of his 31 flavors of how to be creative, but I’ve cut them all all up into groups that reflect my take on what is good advice (and what probably isn’t). […]