Hugh MacLeod
Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards
I’m Hugh MacLeod. I’m a cartoonist. Occasionally I write books.
gapingvoid is interested in start-up culture, because changing business for the better is what we’re about; that’s what Social Object Factory is about. We live and breathe it; we help everyone from lone entrepreneurs, to mid-sizers, to Fortune 500’s do the same. Check out our work here.
We create art that helps companies kick ass, end of story.
We also have a daily cartoon newsletter that makes a lot of people happy.
If you just want to say ‘Hello’, feel free to email me, anytime.
If you want to talk business, then it’s probably best to please contact my business partner, gapingvoid CEO Jason Korman, here. We look forward to working with you. Thanks!
Prints |
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October 29, 2010
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[Moleskine drawing from 2009: “Tried Meaningful”. You can see the enlarged image here. See more like this over at the Moleskine archive etc.]
“Ideas that do not risk offense, aren’t.”
And yes, your business is an idea. Your product is an idea. The conversation you’re trying to have with your market is also an idea.
Hey, I didn’t say any of this stuff was easy…
March 8, 2010
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This one is called “The Intense Longing”. The latest from the “Moleskine” series [Click here to enlarge etc].
Friday night I was in Marfa, hearing my favorite local band, The Doodlin’ Hogwallops, play a gig at Padre’s. Because I was driving, I wasn’t drinking any alcohol, so I just stuck to black coffee the whole night.
Once the caffeine started kicking in I got out my drawing pen…
“Longing” is a lovely idea to wrestle with, because from the moment we become sentient beings, our lives are utterly saturated with it.
The longing to be closer to God. The longing to be closer to Nature. The longing to feel more alive. The longing to love and to feel loved. The longing for truth, beauty, goodness, sex, experience, poetry, art, strength, music, friendship, family, affection, desire, magic, power, laughter, joy, meaning, resonance…
It never goes away, no matter how smart, sexy, witty or successful we become. It’s the broth we spend our whole lives stewing in: The longing to touch that which can never be touched.
Which is why I think it”s a REALLY good idea try to express it somehow, even if the results will be invariably mixed…
February 22, 2010
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Very cool. “Tried Life”, one of my favorites from the “Moleskine” series, is now for sale over on the gallery. You can see the enlarged image here.
January 27, 2010
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Drew this one last night at the bar. One of my favorites so far.
[The Moleskine archive is here…]
[About Hugh. Cartoon Archive. Commission Hugh. Sign up for Hugh’s “Daily Cartoon” Newsletter.]
October 30, 2009
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Just finished this new Moleskine drawing: “Tried Meaningful”. You can see the enlarged image here. Let me know what you think!
[See more like this over at the Moleskine archive.]
[Backstory: About Hugh. E-mail Hugh. Twitter. Limited Edition Prints. Cartoon Archive. Newsletter. Book. Interview. Essential Reading: “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About ‘Cube Grenades’ But Were Afraid To Ask.”]
September 22, 2009
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For a while there, I was toying with the idea of doing more big pieces, like Marfa One, photographed above.
Now I’m not so sure. I think long-term, I prefer a more “mobile” art form, like the business card cartoons or the Moleskines.
I will do more large pieces in the future, I believe. Just not too many of them. Maybe one or two a year. Unless people start commissioning them, of course…
[Backstory: About Hugh. E-mail Hugh. Twitter. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. EVIL PLANS. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades.]
August 21, 2009
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[“Advertising Moleskine”. 5“x7”. Framed. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[Unframed. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
Just shipped this off in the mail today– a commissioned, framed Moleskine drawing.
Dave Whittle, an advertising executive down in Australia, commissioned me to draw him a Moleskine, based on an old cartoon print-out of mine, that he had hanging on his office wall.
A Cube Grenade. Exactly.
I sold my first Moleskine to a collector in Paris. This one is going to somebody in the South Pacific. I love the way the Internet gives relatively small operations like my own a global reach. Thanks, Dave!.
[gapingvoid commissions…] [More Moleskines for sale on the gallery page here.]
June 7, 2009
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[“Advertising Moleskine”. 5“x7”. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
Dave Whittle, an advertising executive down in Australia, commissioned me to draw him a Moleskine, based on an old cartoon print-out of mine, that he had hanging on his office wall.
A Cube Grenade. Exactly.
Yes, I’ll have it framed, like this one.
It was a fun project. It turned out well. I am pleased. Thanks, Dave!.
[gapingvoid commissions…]
May 25, 2009
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Traditional advertising doesn’t work very well.
Sure, it tries, and tries hard, but most of the time, it fails.
It fails far worse now than it ever did during the golden era of TV or print. Those days are gone. We live in The Internet Era now.
Old, traditional advertising was all about creating messages for the media, not about creating social objects for the people using the media.
“Social Objects” is what makes the Internet work, what makes the Internet possible.
Without the social objects, there would simply be no World Wide Web.
Social objects are part of the Web’s very DNA.
In The Internet Era, an ad that isn’t first and foremost a social object, is useless waste of money. Even if we’re not talking about the Internet, per se.
Which is why I invented Cube Grenades: social objects in cartoon form, designed to star real conversations between people.
To me, Cube Grenades aren’t just about cartoons. Cube Grenades are about something far more important- they’re about doing something that creates real change between people, that creates something that actually matters to people.
Social Objects: I use cartoons. What do you use? Serious question.
The groovy cats over at Shit Creek Con sul ting com mis sio ned me to design them their business card. After loo king at the half-dozen or so ideas I pre sen ted to them, they chose the one above.
Shit Creek are a Mic ro soft Gold Part ner. It seems a big part of their busi ness is coming in and clea ning up the mess left behind by the large tech con sul tan cies [I’m not naming any names]. So that’s the idea I ran with.
The name of their com pany implies they have a lot of atti tude. They wan ted a car toon that con ve yed this. Easy. It was a fan tas tic com mis sion and I’m very happy with the car toon they chose.
[The commission archive is here…]
For the last five years I’ve designed the poster for the annual Techcrunch Party. This is the one I did for July, 2010.
[The commission archive is here…]
A “cube grenade” commission I just completed for Thoughtworks, the global IT consulting company.
Thoughtworks has this term, “Watermelon”, to describe a project that goes terribly wrong, that looks all well and good on the outside (green), but as the project comes to an end, turns out to be a huge ol’ expensive mess on the inside (red). I just took the idea and ran with it.
We’re going to turn this design into a 100 large framed prints, as Christmas presents for their clients. A fun little “conversation starter” to hang on their walls… which of course, is what the the whole cube grenade idea is all about. “Art With Purpose” etc.
Fun!
“The processor is an expression of human potential”. Exactly.
“Silicon chip as metaphor for blank canvas.” Exactly.
So this was my idea for my client, Intel. You know, the big microprocessor company. “Silicon Chips” etc.
First I drew a wee doodle of a microprocessor, like the one above.
Then I added a tagline to the image. “The processor is an expression of human potential”.
This was my “blank canvas” to start with, as it were.
And then I started to fill said blank canvas with images. As demonstrated below:
The images themselves don’t matter per se. The fact they were drawn by me doesn’t matter, either. That’s not the point.
The point is, as always, human potential. And what Intel can do to help said human potential reveal itself.
“The processor is an expression of human potential”. Exactly.
“Silicon chip as metaphor for blank canvas.” Exactly.
Then I added the Intel logo and their tagline, “Visibly Smart”.
We printed these up as fine art prints. Then I hand-signed them at the Intel stand at the 2001 CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. You can seethe photos here on Flickr.
[The commission archive is here…]
[“Sacred Zombie Cow”. Click here to download free high-rez download etc.]
Thanks to David Gammel of Orgpreneur.com for the great commission. Backstory here.
A “Sacred Zombie Cow” is David’s term for an idea that still lives within an organization, that has long outlived its usefulness.
[The commission archive is here…]
Recently I completed one of my most ambitious pieces in a while– a private commission from Tara, for her boyfriend, Remi’s birthday.
Go here to check out all the photos and the complete backstory.
[Though I haven’t talked about it too much on the blog, yes, I do private commissions. Feel free to contact me at gapingvoid@gmail.com if you want to discuss further, Thanks.]
[The commission archive is here…]
February, 2010 I flew to St. Louis, to give a talk at Purina, the giant pet food company that’s owned by Nestle. It was their big, annual digital summit. All their top digital marketing folk (and their top ad agency digital folk) were there.
I talked about “Social Objects”, and how I believe they are the future of marketing.
Above is the print they commissioned me to draw for them. I like how it turned out. “All products are information” refers back to something I wrote a few years ago, “The Kinetic Quality”.
How often do large, well-known companies call you up and ask you to draw a cartoon for them? Exactly. I’ve worked in the tech world for big clients before– Sun, Dell, Microsoft etc– but this is my firstcommission with a large, FMCG brand (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods). Not to mention, I’ve always held Nestle and Purina in very high regard. So naturally, I was pretty excited. Rock on.
[The commission archive is here…]
I did this cube grenade for Fizz, the well-known Word-Of-Mouth marketing agency [They did all that ground-breaking stuff for Pabst Blue Ribbon etc.].
This idea is so simple… do I really have to explain it? Exactly.
[The commission archive is here…]
These are three from an ongoing series of cube grenades I was commissioned to do for Rackspace, the large hosting company in San Antonio. I was hired by Rob La Gesse [he’s the same guy who hired uber-blogger, Robert Scoble], to create new ideas/messages in order to shake things up internally. So far it’s working.
[You can see the Rackspace cartoon archive here.]
[The commission archive is here…]
Jerry Colonna used to be a Venture Capitalist. He was EXTREMELY successful as a partner with Fred Wilson at Flatiron Partners. Before that, he was an investment banker on Wall Street.
Then he decided he wanted out of the business. He had made his money, he now wanted to give back. He wanted to teach.
After teaching business classes at CUNY in New York for a little while, he set himself up as a business coach. A damn good one.
“A bit like being a shrink,” he told me, “but more business-focused.”
A big part of his modus operandi is not telling people what to do with their businesses, but trying to get them over their fears of achieving that which they MUST do, if they want to become the people they one day hope to be.
“The issues my clients fear the most tend not to be the actual stuff out there– competition, cashflow, marketing,” he says, “but the worst-case imaginary scenarios. ‘The Monster Inside Their Heads’, as it were. So a central tenet to what I do is helping them to get over The Monster.”
So he commissioned me to draw a Monster-themed signed, fine-art print to give away as presents to his best customers and allies. Something to keep on the office wall as a cons tant reminder.
I was glad to do it. I’ve always got my fair share of Monsters, myself. Rock on.
[The commission archive is here…]
A wee commission I did for crashcourse.ca, an education resource. Yes, I wrote the headline. Go see.
[The commission archive is here…]
My old advertising buddy, Vinny Warren, commissioned me to draw him a Cube Grenade for his Chicago-based ad agency, The Escape Pod.
“We are not in the advertising business, we are in the decommodification business” is a line of mine that Vinny has been borrowing from me for a while now. So it seemed appropriate to design something around that.
[The commission archive is here…]
Tim Porthouse over at Zealeap.com commissioned this design for his company. The copy at the bottom (which I wrote) reads:
“when a business stops creating, it dies. when a business stops creating culture, it dies. business cultures are not created, they are re-created. business cultures are not created, they are co-created. without collaboration, there is no creation. a business that does not understand its own culture. does not understand its own business. culture matters. the world has gotten too interesting and too competitive to think otherwise. reality is scary. reality is wonderful.”
Cultural Transformation, Baby. That’s where it’s at these days. Exactly.
[The commission archive is here…]
A cube grenade I did for HNI Insurance.
A lot of HNI’s trucking clients operate with profit margins of around 2%. Ouch.
I like the cartoon just because it’s brutally in-your-face and to the point. No messing around.
Of course, the easiest way for their clients to increase their margin, is to lower their risk. Which is where HNI comes in. Ker-chiing.
[More HNI cartoons here etc.]
[The commission archive is here…]
In early 2009 I was hired by a Brazilian ad agency, agenciaclick to create a privately commissioned edition of the Cube Grenade above.
As with my other clients, they didn’t want these prints just for themselves; they wanted to give these out to their clients, as conversation starters.
“All brands are open brands? Huh? What does that mean? Do you agree with it? Why? What does “open” actually mean? What does “brand” actually mean…?” You get the picture. The same idea that made The Blue Monster so successful. Again, it wasn’t about the message, the object. It was all about the social.
[The commission archive is here…]
The Blue Monster was a cartoon-based “Social Object” that me and my Microsoft buddy, Steve Clayton, unleashed on the good but unsuspecting folk at Microsoft back in 2007. For those unfamiliar with it, you can find the backstory here on Google. It’s probably my best-know idea to date.
[The commission archive is here…]
One of cartoons I did for the hackthephonecompany.com campaignfor the client,Line2, the SF-based VoIP company.
Yeah, we went after AT&T. Naughty us.
[The Line2 cartoon archive is here.]
[The commission archive is here…]
There seems to be a conversation happening internally at my client, Rackspace. Spearheaded by people like Robert Scoble and the guy who hired him (and who also hired me), Rob La Gesse.
“Don’t be normal”.
Who wants a “normal” job, anyway?
Who wants a “normal” employer, anyway?
Who wants a “normal” life, anyway?
Exactly.
So why not say it, loud and proud?
So I drew some cartoons on the subject.
I’m thinking they’d make great recruiting posters…
[P.S. At the time of posting these on the blog, Rob hadn’t seen these cartoons yet. He lets me post my ideas “live”, without having to go through him first. THAT IS WHY I’m psyched to be working with Rob and Rackspace. Just so you know.]
[The commission archive is here…]
Jeff Sandquist, Robert Scoble’s old boss at Microsoft’s Channel Nine, commissioned me to design this business card for him.
He wanted a design that worked for both techies and non-techies alike. Something that made him appear both good at his job, but still a human being etc.
Fun! Thanks, Jeff!
[The commission archive is here…]
April 30, 2009
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[“Murmer”. Ink & Pencil on Moleskine. April, 2009.]
I have some new original pieces for sale on my gapingvoid gallery page, including three new “Moleskine” pieces.
I’m asking myself a lot these days, “How did I get into the art business?” It certainly wasn’t intentional. That could be a good thing, of course…
I hope you’ll check them out. Thanks, Everybody!
April 23, 2009
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[“Fred 44″. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
Last year I worked on a large, 18“x24” pencil & ink drawing called, “Fred 44″.
It was a study for what went on to become my largest painting to date, “DesertManhattan”.
My friend, Laura owns a really nice camera, so we decided to take another picture of it.
Voila! Hope you like…
April 21, 2009
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[“Moleskine 42″ in a nice wooden frame. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[“Moleskine 42″ before the framing, approx 5“x7”: Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[Close-up view]
In May 4th, 2008 I blogged about a new drawing, “Moleskine 42″.
I’m planning on doing more of these. I like their simple, plain, black & white austerity.
Yes, I’ll be selling them. I’ll also be taking commissions, just like I did with The “Wikipedia” Moleskine. If you’re in the market, feel free to let me know via email, Thanks.
[Moleskine Archive is here.]
February 10, 2009
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[“Wikipedia Moleskine”. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
Somebody recently commissioned me to draw them one of my Moleskines. The idea is to frame and mount it, like “Moleskine 42″.
The guy has issues with Wikipedia. Long story.
January 23, 2009
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[Close-up of “DesertManhattan”. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
1. I started DesertManhattan in September [See initial post here]. I thought it would take me a couple of weeks. Now I’m thinking, if I get it done within six months, that’ll be pretty good going.
2. I don’t work on it that much. Maybe twice a week for a couple of hours. Usually I enter the studio when I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by other stuff. It serves as some sort of refuge for me, when I don’t want the other stuff to matter, at least for a while.
3. I’m in no hurry to get it finished. Maybe I’ll work on it for a couple of years. Maybe I’ll never finish it, but just keep on working on it forever– like a blog, a work in progress, a never-ending story. Just an idea.
4. DesertManahattan is not a work of art. It’s a cartoon. I’m not an artist. I’m a cartoonist. To me, the distinction is important.
5. I might sell DesertManahattan. I probably won’t. At least, not yet.
6. I like the Build-it-slowly-but-obsessively approach. It’s not the only way I like to work, but it certainly has its place.
7. Yes.
June 1, 2008
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[Another one from my Moleskine… Click on image to enlarge etc.]
May 31, 2008
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[“Moleskine 42″ in a nice wooden frame. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
On May 4th I blogged about “Moleskine 42″:
[Overview: Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[Close-up view]
“Moleskine 42″. A wee sketch I did over the weekend in my Moleskine notebook. Approx 5x7 inches.
If you like this print, we have many more over in our gallery.
It was a single drawing in a brand new Moleskine notebook. Which as you will see from the photo above, I went out and got mounted and framed.
This will look good on somebody’s wall. Yes, it is for sale. We’re talking in the $700 range.
[UPDATE:] Somebody made me an offer for the piece, and I accepted it. Rock on.
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[Overview: Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[Close-up view]
“Moleskine 42″. A wee sketch I did over the weekend in my Moleskine notebook. Approx 5x7 inches.
May 10, 2007
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Just another day in the life of a Hugh MacLeod Moleskine. Click on image to enlarge etc.
