“cube grenades”: using my commissions to help your business kick ass.

I’m currently accepting new private and corporate commissions a.k.a. “Cube Grenades”. Please read on for some selected case studies, or for more background theory, read the commission archives. Thanks! gapingvoid@gmail.com.

Sure, they’re great social objects, but they have another purpose: They’re good tools for a company trying to engage in what’s called “Cultural Transformation”.

[The one that started it all: "The Blue Monster". Backstory here etc.]

You change markets in your favor by changing the culture- either your own company culture, or the culture of the industry you’re in. In my world, that’s where the REAL opportunity lies.

That’s the change I want to help affect. That’s where I think my cartoons can be the most useful and valuable.

1. SHIT CREEK CONSULTING

The groovy cats over at Shit Creek Consulting commissioned me to design them their business card. After looking at the half-dozen or so ideas I presented to them, they chose the one above.

Shit Creek are a Microsoft Gold Partner. It seems a big part of their business is coming in and cleaning up the mess left behind by the large tech consultancies [I’m not naming any names]. So that’s the idea I ran with.

The name of their company implies they have a lot of attitude. They wanted a cartoon that conveyed this. Easy. It was a fantastic commission and I’m very happy with the cartoon they chose.

[The commission archive is here...]

2. TECHCRUNCH

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...]

3. ORGPRENEUR.COM

["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...]

4. PRIVATE COMMISSION- TARA AND REMI

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...]

5. PURINA

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...]

6. PSFK

PSFK, one of my top favorite marketing blogs, had a wee conference in April, 2010 in New York.

So I designed this cube grenade for them, to go on posters and t-shirts etc.

Basically, I took their purple logo (which I’ve always loved) and applied my trademark all-over “doodle” style to it.

The word, “gather” is their idea, which you’ll see if you click on the conference link above.

[P.S. Also check out the neat little badges I designed for the event.]

Thanks to Piers Fawkes, the mastermind behind the PSFK empire, for the opportunity. Also, for writing a nice little blog post about working with me on the commission. I’m a huge fan.

[The commission archive is here...]

7. THE ESCAPE POD

My old advertising buddy, Vinny Warren, commissioned me to design a print 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 for a while now. So it seemed appropriate to design something around that.

[The commission archive is here...]

8. THE MONSTER IN YOUR HEAD

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 constant reminder.

I was glad to do it. I’ve always got my fair share of Monsters, myself. Rock on.

[The commission archive is here...]

9. CRASHCOURSE.CA

A wee commission I recently did for crashcourse.ca, an education resource. Yes, I wrote the headline. Go see.

[The commission archive is here...]

10. ZEROCELSIUS

Ross over at Zerocelsius Wealth Studio commissioned this one from me.

Ross’ goal with all his clients is to get them to that point where “They just know”.

Where they’re at. Where they need to be. Where they have to go first in order to get there.

And when they finally reach that point mentally, they tend to experience a feeling of what I call “Calm Catharsis”. I wanted to capture that in the drawing; I think I succeeded.

Thanks, Ross, for the great gig. It was a fun!

[The commission archive is here...]

11. ZEALEAP

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...]

12. AGENCIACLICK

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...]

13. MICROSOFT: THE BLUE MONSTER

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...]

14. SUPERGENIUS

This is one of two prints I designed for Andy Sernovitz’s Supergenius conference in New York, July 20th, 2010. I gave a little talk there, along with a lot of other authors doing the same.

The headline is one of Andy’s two most famous Word-Of-Mouth mantras. As he says,

Advertising is the cost of being boring.

If people won’t talk about you for free, you have to pay them to do it.

There is a direct relationship between being buzzworthy — earning word of mouth — and how much you’ll have to pay to promote yourself through paid marketing.

Give people a reason to talk about you for free, or you’ll have to buy advertising to get the message out.

It’s easier, more fun, more rewarding, and more profitable to focus on being remarkable and earning the type of fans and followers who will promote you, for free, forever.

These big ideas should be taped to your computer monitor, stuck in your wallet, and hung in your conference room.

Thanks to Andy for a great commission- and for a great conference in New York!

Great a quick poster or T-shirt in GasPedal’s WOM store.
Get a fine art print in my gallery.

[The commission archive is here...]

15. “ENTREPRENEURIAL AGITPROP”

[Heh. My red “We Need To Talk” print makes a cameo appearance on the BBC, courtesy of Robert Scoble…]

My friend, Robert Scoble wrote an interesting blog post about why he was working for Rackspace, the big San Antonio web hosting service.

“To Help Entrepreneurs”. Apparently Rackspace allows him a lot of leeway to do just that,

And I also remember Michael Arrington saying something similar on The Gillmor Gang about his business. Helping the entrepreneurial community is a big driving force behind Techcrunch.

Then I was thinking to myself, “To Help Entrepreneurs” is ALSO a big part why I like designing Cube Grenades, why the idea can function as a proper business.

How? Because they work as “Entrepreneurial Agitprop” (That’s a phrase I just coined earlier today).

“To Help Entrepreneurs”. “Entrepreneurial Agitprop”. Both these ideas are resonating with me right now. Expect to see more from me on them both in future. Thanks.

[The commission archive is here...]