This is the coolest things I’ve seen all week. An office hallway designed to resemble a New York Subway train.

As the tech market heats up (yet again), expect to see more architectural delights like this. It’s harder to recruit top talent if your offices are crappy etc.

The people with choices prefer to work in “Inspired Spaces”. Deal with it…

“Office Art That Actually Matters” is the unofficial tagline for gapingvoid, at least that’s the one we’ve been using, that’s our current mantra etc.

A good architect tries to create a space or a building on that ignites people, on a daily basis. Ditto with designers. Whay shouldn’t a cartoonist try to do the same?

It’s not a bad way to spend a life, I suppose…

Yay! gapingvoid laptop decals [in beta]. We’ve been doing laptop decals for our corporate clients for a while. Gapingvoid images printed on this super polyester fabric. It fits perfectly on an 11″*13″ Macbook and is re-peelable, reusable. You can change them up, put them on walls, or glass partitions or whatever.

There is no sales page for them yet, but you can order custom images for $50 by emailing us here. They’ll go on cube walls and will never damage the surface you apply them to. You can also customize them with your company logo, so you can spread the good word with your awesomeness embedded.

[From the newsletter:]

Everybody wants to be normal, but few people are aware of how costly a choice that is.

It means never taking a risk, it means never sticking your neck out, it mean never embracing a radically new idea.

And so instead of living an incredible life, you’re stuck with nine-to-five, shopping malls and Reality TV. Lucky you.

[First published, Sept. 2009]

Recently on Twitter, I wrote:

Art that brightens up the office vs Art that brightens up the home. Two different vibes altogether. I prefer making the former.

To which my friend, Kathy Sierra replied:

Good! Homes are less likely to *need* brightening the way offices do. I can brighten my home just by making toast.

Whether we’re talking wee cube grenade laser copies or something much larger, like The Purple Cow Print, when I launched the gapingvoid gallery earlier this year, that was my intention– to make art for the workspace.

This desire goes back to my early years working as an advertising creative. There was always cool stuff– fine art, posters, graphic design, cartoons– hanging up everywhere. Stuff to amuse and inspire us, stuff to tweak our brains in the right direction. And though its effect on the agency’s bottom line would’ve been hard to measure, somehow it worked– or at least, helped.

Why can’t all offices be more like this? Is there some law that requires certain types of businesses to maintain a dull, gray, machine-like, life-sucking visual environment? You could ague that maybe for some companies, sure, but that’s not a world I’ve ever aspired to belong to.

“Office Art” tends to come in two main categories: 1. REALLY expensive. 2. REALLY cheesy.

I wanted to make office art that was neither…

[Afterthought:] Of course, a lot of my collectors work from home, therefore their offices are in the house, not in an office building. But the prints were made with the workspace in mind, not the “living” space, regardless.

“Meaningful brands outperform stock market by 120%”.

120%. And why is that, you ask? Perhaps it’s related to something Seth Godin and I were riffing on, WAY back in 2008:

SETH: You can’t drink any more bott­led water than you already do. Or buy more wine. Or more tea. You can’t wear more than one pair of shoes at a time. You can’t get two mas­sa­ges at once…

So, what grows? What do mar­ke­ters sell that sca­les?

I’ll tell you what: Belief. Belon­ging. Mat­te­ring. Making a dif­fe­rence. Tri­bes. We have an unli­mi­ted need for this.

In a world where commodities rule, where everything is free on the Internet, where everything is being outsourced to India or China, “Meaning” is the only thing you have that people are going to be willing to pay a lot for. This is what The Hughtrain was all about.

And “Meaning”, of course, starts with language. So think about the kind of language your brand is using, think about how you can evolve the language, the “conversation”, up the food chain.

As this is something ad agencies are particularly good at (when they allow themselves to be), I think David & Co may be on to something…

The recent Edward Snowden story seems to have sent shock waves around the Internet intelligentsia… the post-Cluetrain, quasi-libertarian, web-enabled social-network of Web 2.0, or whatever it is we call it nowadays.

It wasn’t the fact that US State security had been so easily and openly compromised that seemed to shock people, but it was more a sudden sense of lost innocence that seemed to permeate the buzz-o-sphere.

When is “private”, no longer private?

Are Google, Facebook et al giving the Fed unlimited access to their/our data? Are they lying? Are they telling the truth? Whose data is it, anyway? Is the government now spying on its citizens like the old East German Stasi? And what if they weren’t? Would terrorists suddenly start having a field day?

As citizens, what are entitled to know about the inner workings of our government?

I don’t have the answers. But I have been watching the big Internet companies get larger and more powerful, getting thirstier and thirstier for our data, while alternative, more “Open Web” models become increasingly marginalized.

This palpable sense of lost innocence brought to mind the words of Don McLean’s “American Pie” song, which I turned into the cartoon above.

This sorrow-inducing tension between open and closed culture has always been with us, just the Internet makes everything in our lives so easily accessible, recordable and trackable. This makes us all the more aware of it.

Who knows? This may be the US Government’s “Dell Hell” moment: with millions of Government employees now wired up to the Internet, people are able to expose what they perceive to be injustice with a few key strokes. Will the government be forced to be more open knowing that covert operations will be exposed?

It feels a little like the early days of social media when big companies first realized that their customers and employees had been handed a strange, new power. Presumably, the government will continue to ratchet up the penalties and prosecutions for giving up ‘state secrets’, but I suspect we’ll be seeing more of these Edward Snowden incidents, not less. Time will tell.

Here’s a cartoon I did recently, that I understand got a lot of love internally at Rackspace.

A cartoon-manifesto, of sorts.

A pledge by the company to maintain its humanity, in spite of what has been insane growth over the last couple of years.

To an outsider, it’ll mean little. To somebody inside, the hope was for it to really resonate.

Resonate, as opposed to just parroting the usual corporate-speak.

Language matters. Language, like love, has to risk something if it’s actually going to mean anything.

Or else you’re just parroting.

Then again, you don’t want to say anything that you or your shareholders will one day regret, even if you had the best of intentions.

It’s the razor’s edge that smart companies must learn to walk along, if they wish to remain smart companies.

From the outside, leadership looks like a guy sitting on top of the pile, commanding all he surveys.

The reality is much different; it feels more like being a little piece of driftwood in a tsunami.

Things happening all around you, things flying all around you you, never ending. It’s a lot more messy than it looks…

Business is messy. Business is complex. Leadership is often not what it appears to be. It’s not so much about having everything ‘under control’, but creating the vision, direction and purpose for your organization. With that vision, people have confidence.

The real challenge of leadership is making everything look under control even if in reality, it’s all just organized chaos.

All art is aspirational, at least the good stuff is. Put simply, it aspires to a higher state of being, a higher form of consciousness.

And few environments are more aspirational than a good co-working space. It’s where people go to play their best game [And if it isn’t, they’re in BIG trouble].

And I’m trying my best to be part of that energy…

In case you haven’t seen it yet, my seminal PDF, “How To Be Creative” is probably the best thing I ever wrote. And yes, it’s still free.

First published in 2004, the last time I counted (and that was a few years ago), it had been downloaded over 5 million times (five million!). In 2009 Penguin turned it into my first hardcover, “Ignore Everybody”.

I hope you’ll check it out, Thanks.

Today our friends at Tapestry launched a new version of their tapable storytelling app, including a new story based on my image “Did I Matter.”  With so many touch screens in our lives, its kinda fun to be able to tap through a little story, step by step, line by line, etc. etc.  You can tap through all of the gapingvoid tapestries here.  Enjoy.

I remember being a young, poor, and scared student, having a terrifying year living in London.

I remember one morning, being caught in some sort of crushing existential dread as I rode the Underground to school. Thinking how I would be crushed by the harsh environment around me.

Thinking about how my happy little undergraduate life was about to end and that I’d just end up a little stain on the urban tarmac.

I had nothing, really. No job to look forward to, no money of my own. In a town twice as expensive as New York.

I had never known the feeling of having “Nothing” before then. It was scary. REALLY scary.

Right when the existentialism was starting to crescendo as I stepped off the train, I suddenly snapped out of it.

I realized that right then and there, everything I needed I already had.

Between my ears. Inside my mind.

That’s where it was. That’s where the treasure was buried.

My mind was a free agent. It didn’t belong to anybody else..

As long as my mind remained free, then I would be free. All the external stuff was just temporary nonsense I’d soon get over.

I emerged back onto the street, back into the sunshine, a very happy young man; the happiest I had been in a while.

Jason and I were thinking, if people like our daily newsletter so much, it would be awesome to take what we’ve learned from that, and create something useful for our clients. Ergo:

Introducing CULTUREMAIL: “Just like our own gaping­void news­let­ter, but for your own busi­ness and peo­ple.”

We’re REALLY excited by this: A proven new tool that helps leaders lead,  helps leaders effect change, simply by using e-mail (or whatever delivery vehicle you prefer).

A communication idea designed to bypass the usual expensive, overwrought (and mostly ignored) internal comms.

It’s a disarmingly sim­ple idea: We take what we’ve lear­ned from sen­ding out our own daily news­let­ter over the years, then apply it to create sim­ple and effec­tive bes­poke client news­let­ters for lea­ders to spread their ideas: We call it “CultureMail”.

We take your thoughts and ideas and, after a thorough con­sul­ta­tion pro­cess, we use our own uni­que world­view, crea­ti­vity and agile skill set to turn it into a powerful and compelling e-mail news­let­ter campaign.

Com­plete with on-message gaping­void car­toons and writ­ten con­tent that peo­ple will actually want to read, engage with, forward to their friends. Something that actually reso­na­tes with peo­ple and effects change.

A news­let­ter actually desig­ned to go under the usual corporatespeak radar and make an actual dif­fe­rence, desig­ned to help lea­ders lead, desig­ned to help change the com­pany culture for the better.

Just like our own gaping­void news­let­ter, but for your busi­ness and peo­ple. Crea­tive, power­ful, dis­rup­tive and on-message.

We look forward to discussing it more with you. Feel free to ping us anytime, Thanks. Email:  hugh at gapingvoid dot com.

This weekend the gapingvoid homepage made a big change that was a long time coming– now you you no longer have to be a friend or family to ‘get’ what we do

The actual business model is the same as before, it’s just a lot more apparent now, especially to people outside the gapingvoid club:

We make art that helps com­pa­nies affect real change, both inside and outside the organization.

We amplify your ideas in ways that deeply impact your teams, cus­to­mers and stakeholders.

We use scien­ti­fi­cally vali­da­ted methods to ignite crea­ti­vity, spread ideas and arti­cu­late sha­red purpose.

We ena­ble mea­ning­ful con­ver­sa­tions and get peo­ple to work smar­ter, more crea­ti­vely, and stay focu­sed on the things that really matter.

We give you the tools you need to move your busi­ness: Inte­llec­tually, crea­ti­vely and profitably.

We moved the blog over from the homepage to gapingvoid.com/blog.

I’m still drawing as many cartoons as before, and the the coolest newsletter on the face of the earth still goes out, five times a week.

gapingvoid started out as my personal blog over twelve years ago, now it’s about something much larger and exciting: Using art to help businesses change.

People ask, as an artist, why are you so obsessed with the office? And I answer, because that is where the action is, that is where we all need the most help.

Sure, there are other places where the human drama takes place: homes, bars, restaurants, schools, shops, the street etc. But considering how central business is to our lives, I find it odd that more people don’t understand how important art can be to the work environment. So gapingvoid is on a mission to help them understand this better.

Hope you like the new design, and if you think you can help us with our mission, we’d love to talk to you. Email: hugh at gapingvoid. Thanks!