If you’ve ever been on Twitter and seen the image of a smiling whale being lifted by little birds, then you’ve met “The Fail Whale.” “The minds at Twitter found it on iStockphoto and used the image as a 404 page,” Mashable.com tells us. And of course, if you’ve been cruising the information superhighway with internet speed for any length of time, you’ve met your fair share of 404 pages – they’re the ones that tell you that the file you wanted wasn’t found.
There have been a number of creative 404 pages. One of our newer favorites references the Double Rainbow Guy we mentioned in our previous post – check it out at TechCrunch’s post “Blippy Has Pretty Much The Best 404 Page Ever. What Does It Mean?“.
But this particular image itself, created by Yiying Lu, is “Lifting a Dreamer.” The artist posted her image on iStockphoto, and Twitter decided to use it. She says of its appearance, “It’s not a Fail Whale… it has absolutely nothing to do with failure. Rather than people seeing the picture as a sign of technology’s failure, they should see it as a sign of, you know, ‘sit back and relax.’ It should be a visual soother, like, it should be a visual therapy rather than something that people would get really mad [about].”
While many may have feelings of anger toward the innocent whale for being the bearer of bad news, others have embraced the image and have been inspired to create their own versions. Yiying Lu has created a page with a bunch of images and video that she’s collected at her site, whatisfailwhale.info.
Visit Mashable.com for the full interview and to see examples of some of her other designs.
Tags: 404 Pages, Internet Speed, Twitter