February 5, 2005
fine art prints update
In the comments of a semi-recent gapingvoid post, Alan Herrel, one of the funniest guys in the blogosphere, offers me some wonderful business advice for my fine art print idea:
Fine Art Prints?
naahhhh. You need to rethink here. offer ‘limited editions’ printed on that cheap micro-perf business card stock that you can buy at the Gigantic Office Supply Outlet or walmart which ever is closer..(time is money you know)and limited by how many times you hit the ‘print this’ button.….
for a few extra bucks you can toss in a presentation case to display them crafted from…”Genuine Imitation Virgin Vinyl!!” in a plethora of personality pleasing colors!!! avacado, harvest gold, orange shag carpet.…..
For those that need or want that ‘strong lasting experience’, a limited edition, blown up, printed on standard post card size stock, and offered as the ”Postal” Series, perfect for writing ‘I fucking quit’ on the back.…
The ‘Nuclear’ series can be printed on 8.5 by 14 legal stock, which ya oughta pick up for a song(keep an eye on production costs) since the legal industry has moved to regular size paper, and the only folks using legal size are your kids school for newsletters.
oh yeah…loose the frame idea, make the bastards buy their own damn frames! ya can build another website where you can have folks take pictures of their completed missions, and post them.
This week I spent a lot of time shuttling contracts and e-mails between myself, my agent and a very smart fine art publisher. Soon I should have some interesting stuff to sell both on and offline. Rock on.
The online and conventional retail markets are quite different; both have their pros and cons. We’ll see how it develops.
I like Alan’s take on it… Actually, after thinking about it a bit I think I would be more inclined to buy fine art prints that were actual business card size than big posters. I don’t feel making the cards bigger really improves them. And art being art, it seems you could charge the same amount for business card size prints as you could for the big ones. Just make it part of the gig.
Printing them at 1:1 scale kind of preserves the intimacy, and god knows, Hugh, you’ve certainly got intimacy down. heh.
Another plus for the 1:1 size is that it makes it easier to find space to hang them…(oh, practicality!) I mean, yeah, it *would* be fun to hang one of the more aggressively hughtrain cards where it dominates dinner conversation or one of the more cruelly truthful NYC cards where it can just plain mock any attempt at pillow talk. But I can also see people buying a collection of their favorites to hang in a nice grid arrangement…
(aside: Do you have any of the relationship cards hanging over your bed? I used to have an antique metal sign from a standard service station that I used for a headboard. It may not have impressed the chicks much, but a buddy of mine wrote a pretty kick ass blues around the idea…)
What I’d *really* like to see is a movement to replace all those insipid workplace posters (you know, kittens in a tree with the slogan “hang in there”) with hugh posters. I can think of a half dozen jobs I might not have quit if it had been your poster instead of the kitten.
Yeah, I’m thinking of Hughtrain-inspired work posters. I’m thinking all sorts of things.
sometime would you post “blobs of Chaos that follow me around” again, I totally dig that one
The link to Alan’s site is broken.
Thanks, Nathan. Duly noted and fixed =)
“Yeah, I’m thinking of Hughtrain-inspired work posters.”
Oh my god — I would buy those in a heartbeat! The perfect antidote to all those mind-numbingly horrible corporate motivational things about “There’s no ‘I’ in Team”. (But there’s definitely a “U” in “Suck”).
They’d have to sell them here:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/cubegoodies/posters/
do it do it do it PLEASE
Although I really do like your fine art prints idea, howabout something more accessible to the average reader of your page– something they would be willing to buy impulsively because they like your webpage and they are only looking at 20– 30 bucks on the purchase?
I was thinking maybe offering posters (as suggested by above commentator) in the 20 – 30 dollar range. I realize not as chic or glamorous as fine art print thing, but I can guarantee you I’d buy a poster…fine art print, I’d have to think a lot harder about that.
Why not borrow a leaf,or a page, or a dogbert or something, from Scott Adams ? .. we’re about ready for a new workplace meme .. with Hughtrain characters in the interconnected, interlinked, hughtrain vs. lovemarks, hierarchy vs. linkarchy world o’ work we’re all learning to live and love.
He made millions and millions .. probably still is. Your stuff is just as sarcastically, sardonically and pertinently to the point(s) as Dibert et al was 10 years ago.