Interview: Fail Whale Creator Yiying Lu Talks Art and Improvisation

April 27th, 2011 by K. T. Bradford

Anyone who’s spent a significant amount of time on Twitter or the Internet at large in the past few years probably knows the Fail Whale, even if you don’t know its name. But you may not know the story behind its creation or the artist who created it. Yiying Lu is a Shanghai-born artist living in Australia whose art extends beyond Twitter’s downtime. Recently, she created the Pale Whale for Conan O’Brian’s return to late night last fall, and in 2009 she won one of the first Shorty Awards in the Design category. These days she’s busy with her new start-up — Walls 360 — and whirlwind (sometimes improvised) art shows. I had a chance to have a conversation with Yiying at South by Southwest Interactive earlier this year, where we talked about technology and the art of improvisation.

LAPTOP: Have you always been in this intersection of art and technology, or did that happen because of the Fail Whale?

Yiying Lu: I always considered myself a right-brain oriented person who was very into art and artistic practices, but because I went to a technology high school, my parents pushed me towards math. I graduated a techie high school back in Shanghai.

After I finished, I decided to travel to Australia because I have relatives there and I loved animals like wallabies and koalas (and sunshine). I studied at the University of Technology in Sydney and took part in their exchange program in the UK to study in London for a semester.

It was very inspiring — the atmosphere was so different. The school was very laid back but everyone was so talented. They didn’t really force you to do anything; they just let you go free and explore your project, which I think is really important.

The Fail Whale wasn’t originally designed for Twitter. It was actually designed as an e-card I sent to my friends. When I missed my friends in Shanghai back in 2002, [the e-card picture] was initially birds lifting up an elephant. I was reading about animal symbolism and I thought what the elephant symbolized was very beautiful. That was drawn in pencil.

When I was traveling to London, I missed my friends in New South Wales. I had learned how to use Illustrator and the colors are more vivid. So, I redrew the piece, which was called Lifting Up a Dreamer, changed it to a whale, and sent it to my friend as an e-card. I was graduating and starting a website, so I put it [on iStock] and thought maybe someone would pick it up.

I didn’t really think much of it at the time. And it was really funny that, after a year or so, there was this guy from Ireland said he liked my artwork and asked me if I knew that Twitter was using it for their downtime service, and I was like “What? Who is Twitter?” I had heard about it, but I had never gone to check it out or know what it did. I went to the website and immediately saw the whale and thought: Oh, interesting.

So, they didn’t commission that directly.

I heard from one of Biz Stone’s interviews that, originally, the picture was supposed to be of LOLcats on a computer, but people thought it was too jokey. Back then they had a small staff and bought a standard license from iStock and didn’t think too much of it. But as soon as it got up there and came up when the site went down, people loved it. People went crazy over it and started a forum and a fan club. The fan club named it Fail Whale.

Have you checked out the website WhatIsFailWhale.info? I haven’t been on there recently, but love seeing people release their creativity with 3D Fail Whale images, Fail Whale tattoos, Fail Whale cakes, and Fail Whale make-up tutorials and all that.