If you’ve been on Twitter in the past month, you’ve probably bumped into the Fail Whale once or twice. The popular social network has been crashing pretty consistently from an influx of tweets and traffic. Seeing the whale, you (like everyone else) might have been frustrated — you might have yelled at the screen. You might hate that whale.
If you do, chances are you don’t know Yiying Lu or the story behind the Fail Whale, originally called “Lifting a Dreamer.” The whale (first drawn as an elephant) was created by Lu as a sweet greeting to her friends overseas. The minds at Twitter (
) found it on iStockphoto and used the image as a 404 page (replacing a picture of a LOLcat).The whale, once an image of Lu’s well-wishes, was supposed to represent the Twitter team’s effort to fix problems of scalability. Instead, the associations have largely been negative. Lu is hoping to turn that around even as she begrudgingly calls herself the “Fail Whale” designer.
Hate it or love it, Lu got on the phone with us to chat about her early artistic influences, her new collection of animal designs, announced exclusively on Mashable (
), and why she hates the term “Fail Whale.”Source:mashable.com
