In my spare time I illustrate and design all sorts of weird and (mostly) geeky stuff and then try to spread some if about on the interwebnet. Usually my combined clickthrough rating is in the low 10s (and that includes my own clicks.)
But last week I completed and seeded an illustration / infographic based on Star Wars. I’d not done it before… well, allright maybe once or twice before, but this was my first serious use of the movie as a theme for a whole illustraiton.
I wondered if it would be possible to recreate the entire plot of the movie using nothing but iconography – that is, using no text, just symbols to tell the story. How would Star Wars be told in hieroglyphics? Or, if you prefer, what if the movie was remade by IKEA?
The illustration took around four lunch hours to complete and once it was done, I seeded it on a few of my favourite blogs to see what would happen.
You can the results in more detail here
Four days later, my girlfriend and I were looking at a bill for excess bandwidth usage on our private hosting server that made me re-create the scene in Empire Strikes Back where Darth Vader dishes the dirt to Luke about his true parentage. (“Nooooo!”)
It turned out that in four days, our 100Gb per month bandwidth limit – usually racking up no-more that about 50 Mb – had overshot its mark by 60Gb.
After the first day of this, I removed the larger version of the image from my own server and hosted it on Imageshack – but that didn’t stop anything. The level of traffic increased each day, costing us more and more money, until we had no choice but to pull the plug on my site and blog. It was defeated.
The illustration had appeared on more blogs that I can keep track of, and has been featured on the Creative Reviews site, IMDb, Smashing Magazine, Quipsologies and quite a few other high turnover sites. It has also been featured in a couple of online Web TV shows.
This is the first thing that I’ve ever done that has become viral – so as a landmark occasion for a designer, I was asked to write up my experience – probably just in case in never happens again, so I’ve got something to look back on fondly, a glistening tear rolling down my cheek.
I’ve now relaunched my Blog at www.waynedorrington.co.uk, now powered by the mighty Blogspot – which Im assured has no bandwidth restrictions, and wont be emailing me twice a day asking for more money.
PS:
I know I’ve missed a few scenes from the illustration – but I had to cut it down somewhere or it would have gone on for another 20 steps. And I was getting tired.
I’m fragile: I work in Creative.