Yiying Lu

Written byJohn Allsopp. 2 comments

John Allsopp

John is a co-founder of the Web Directions conference series and Scroll magazine, and author of one of the earliest books on Microformats. As a software developer, long standing web development speaker and writer, he’s spent the last 15 years working with and developing for the web.

John Allsopp finds out what makes the creator of Twitter's iconic Fail Whale tick.

If ever there was a case to be made for nom­i­na­tive deter­min­ism Yiy­ing Lu must be it. In Shang­hainese, (Yiy­ing was born and brought up in Shang­hai) Yiy­ing means ‘happy and cre­ative’. To meet this hyper­ki­netic woman in her early 20s — an hon­ours grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­sity of Technology’s Design pro­gram in 2007, who’s already been named in The Aus­tralian news­pa­per as one of the 100 emerg­ing inno­va­tion lead­ers — is to be instantly affirmed of her hap­pi­ness. And a brief look at her port­fo­lio is to be assured that she is also most def­i­nitely cre­ative, as any­one famil­iar with her most famous cre­ation will attest.

You’ve not heard of Yiy­ing? Well, unless your only expo­sure to Twit­ter is the near con­stant ref­er­ence to it in the main­stream media, you’ll have seen her hand­i­work, the now iconic ‘Fail Whale’, which rears its head when­ever the wildly pop­u­lar ser­vice goes offline, an occur­rence less fre­quent now than a year or two ago, when peo­ple the world over piled on and began fol­low­ing the likes of Ash­ton Kutcher and Oprah Win­frey. But more of the whale later. How exactly did a woman grow­ing up in Shang­hai in the 1990s end up liv­ing, study­ing and now run­ning a design stu­dio in Syd­ney, Australia?

With­out a hint of irony or self con­scious­ness, Lu says it was Australia’s furry ani­mals which drew her here.

“The rea­son I wanted to study in Aus­tralia was, firstly, I was very much inter­ested in see­ing koalas and kan­ga­roos”. She got off the plane and went “straight to the zoo, and…”, she adds a lit­tle apolo­get­i­cally, “they are really smelly…and enor­mous”. Though she has­tens to add she still feels the same affec­tion for them — a sinus prob­lem at the time block­ing her sense of smell mightn’t have hurt.

Such a fix­a­tion with cud­dly ani­mals would seem a con­tra­dic­tion for the grad­u­ate of a pres­ti­gious, selec­tive math­e­mat­ics and sci­ences focused school, where design and art sim­ply weren’t on the agenda. But appar­ent con­tra­dic­tions are cen­tral to Yiying’s approach to the world. A ‘left brain’ child by her own admis­sion, the draw­ers under her bed lit­er­ally burst­ing with Japan­ese and Chi­nese manga comic books, Yiy­ing chose to pur­sue a tech­ni­cal edu­ca­tion, rec­og­niz­ing the ‘right brain’ short­com­ings in her youth­ful out­look. She says now of that edu­ca­tion, which was some­thing she had to work hard to keep up with, that the abil­ity to think math­e­mat­i­cally helps her with the more tech­ni­cal aspects of design — from using sophis­ti­cated soft­ware, to deter­min­ing the com­plex folds for her recent ‘Auss­ie­gami’ project — a dozen origami pieces depict­ing those furry (and some not so furry) Aus­tralian ani­mals that you can fold yourself.

The ‘Auss­ie­gami’ project per­fectly cap­tures Yiying’s “yin yang” nature: born and raised in ‘the east’, but with a ‘west­ern’ higher edu­ca­tion. Yiy­ing strives for sim­plic­ity — ‘less is more’ as she puts it. She admires the for­mal­ity of paper­cut, water­color and other artis­tic tra­di­tions from Japan and China. But at the same time she acknowl­edges that she is some­thing of a mag­pie ‘col­lect­ing the shiny things that she sees’ as inspi­ra­tion for her work. When peo­ple have observed to her that her Fail Whale, for instance, seems influ­enced by paper­cut tech­niques, with its small palette of con­trast­ing col­ors, and very dis­tinct shapes, Yiy­ing acknowl­edges this but observes that these tech­niques aren’t so much con­scious, but embed­ded in her, com­ing out nat­u­rally as she works.

How did Yiy­ing end up being a designer? Per­haps demon­strat­ing that Gen­er­a­tion Y is indeed a gen­er­a­tion with­out bor­ders, she says “I never had a seri­ous thought about exactly what I was going to be…I was inter­ested in visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and wanted to go down that path­way”. As with many of her gen­er­a­tion, not for her grand plans and schemes, it was rather the con­stant explor­ing that made her real­ize she wanted to be a visual designer. The furry ani­mals (and it must be said, hav­ing fam­ily liv­ing there) brought her to Aus­tralia, and the Uni­ver­sity of NSW. Here, in her foun­da­tion year — her first for­mal expo­sure to design edu­ca­tion — she was awarded the Out­stand­ing Stu­dent in Design. In what was clearly a pre­scient deci­sion, a pro­fes­sor at UTS recruited her to that uni­ver­sity, on the basis Yiy­ing says that “they had the best cof­fee, and they all dressed in black”. A copi­ous cof­fee drinker, the colour­ful Yiy­ing is how­ever the oppo­site of the cliched black wear­ing design stu­dent. These days she returns the favour by teach­ing design at the UTS part time, along with a huge work­load of pro­fes­sional and per­sonal design projects.

What sets Yiy­ing apart from other hard work­ing, cre­ative design­ers is both some­thing of a com­plete acci­dent, yet seem­ingly inevitable. Yes, that whale. Orig­i­nally designed as an eCard for a friend whose party in Ire­land she couldn’t attend, Yiy­ing put the work, among oth­ers, on iStock­Photo, a well known stock photo and art­work site. Biz Stone, one of the co-​​founders of Twit­ter found it here nearly a year later, and licensed it for use on a page that dis­plays when Twit­ter crashed. Such was users’ affec­tion for Twit­ter that the whale became some­thing of a mas­cot for Twit­ter itself, with Twitter’s out­ages almost part of the char­ac­ter of the ser­vice, a lit­tle like the absent-​​mindedness of a beloved great aunt. Indeed, the whale was named by the Twit­ter com­mu­nity, and had its own fan club and web site, before Yiy­ing even knew of the ser­vice and its use of her now iconic image. When she did hear of it she was ini­tially con­cerned that her defin­ing pro­fes­sional achieve­ment would be asso­ci­ated with fail­ure, but she’s put that thought behind her. Rather than react­ing neg­a­tively, Yiy­ing has embraced this viral com­mu­nity of ‘fail whalers’.

Yiy­ing has also embraced the hun­dreds of deriv­a­tive works in homage and ref­er­ence to the whale, from 3D mod­els, to ani­mated ver­sions, games, cock­tails and beers, even tat­toos, to the trib­ute to Michael Jack­son that appeared hours after the singer’s death depict­ing the singer in the place of the whale, lifted up by birds. No crude copy, Yiy­ing says of this work that so good was the illus­tra­tion, she felt she might have done it her­self. It was a par­tic­u­larly apt rework­ing, she observes, given the orig­i­nal title of the Fail Whale was ‘Lift­ing up a dreamer’.

Will Yiy­ing Lu turn out to be a one hit won­der like so many viral phe­nom­ena? Unlike man­u­fac­tured sen­sa­tions, the com­bi­na­tion of clearly great tal­ent, with a refresh­ingly relaxed atti­tude to oth­ers bor­row­ing her work (she only draws the line at oth­ers sim­ply sell­ing repro­duc­tions of her orig­i­nal work) stands her in great stead in an age where as Kevin Kelly puts it “the dig­i­tal econ­omy is … run on a river of copies.” One only needs to com­pare her atti­tude with that of a pre­vi­ous generation’s wun­derkind, Damien Hirst, who has report­edly demanded pay­ment for the use of an image of his £50 mil­lion dia­mond encrusted skull art­work by a teenage graf­fiti artist.

Presently Lu mixes part time teach­ing at UTS with work on brand­ing, illus­tra­tion, art direc­tion and much more, with her own side projects, includ­ing her first ever indi­vid­ual exhi­bi­tion as part of Aus­tralian Web Week and Web Direc­tions South, where she’s col­lab­o­rat­ing with Aus­tralian Aug­mented Real­ity pio­neers MOB. Hav­ing been priv­i­leged enough to have had a sneak look at this and some of her other upcom­ing projects, if you were a bet­ting per­son, you’d be tempted to put a few dol­lars on Yiy­ing Lu being a name you’ll hear more from in the com­ing years.

Further Reading

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Comments on this article

  1. Written byhttp://primesolarwindowshades.webs.com/ on the 23rd of April

    “Scroll Mag­a­zine | Yiy­ing Lu by John All­sopp” was
    indeed a very good read and also I really was in fact quite happy to locate the blog post.
    Thank you,Magda

  2. Written byhttp://Primeawnings.Blogbaker.com/ on the 23rd of April

    “Scroll Mag­a­zine | Yiy­ing Lu by John All­sopp” was a great arti­cle, can’t wait to go through alot more of your post­ings.
    Time to squan­der a lit­tle time on-​​line haha. Thanks for the post –Callie

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