The history behind the blue imp

The blue imp character on the home page seems be a magnet for strong opinions, which range from "I hate it" and "At first I hated it, but now I've grown to like it", "I don't mind him" to "He's cute"

In this blog posting, I'll explain a bit of history and thinking behind the blue imp.

I've also written a blog posting about how to remove the blue imp from your Magnatune experience, if you just don't like him.

HISTORY: back in 2006 I launched BookMooch and hired cartoonist Andrice Arp to design the characters. I wanted something with some humanity, whimsy and a bit of edge to it. The illustration proved to be a big hit, and at conferences where we exhibit, we have big cutouts of the mooch characters, and people line up to have their photo taken next to them.

Most music web sites are very visually techie, with photos of iPods and other devices dominating, like the top of mog's web site (pictured at right). There's no fun, humanity or emotion communicated.

So... for the new music businesses I launched in 2011 (MoodMixes) and 2012 (iLicenseMusic) I hired Andrice again in to illustrate these new web sites that are now part of the Magnatune empire:

People especially liked the "happy pink bunny rabbit" (bottom right of MoodMixes) and he's become our mascot.

So... for Magnatune I wanted to do the same thing -- have Andrice draw a character with whimsy, humanity and a bit of edginess. For inspiration, I found this press photo of me, that was taken 10 years ago when I launched Magnatune in 2003:

for the composition of that photo, I was taking inspiration from the many photos of Winston Churchill looking like this:

But I replaced the cigar with a headphone cable.

Andrice morphed the photo using her inimitable style, and came up with:

So... in a very real way, that blue imp is me, in crazy cartoon style, making a Churchill face at you!

Comments

[Jim Kin]

JB, to really appreciate the blues imp - methinks one must have a bit of the hippie culture still (Distilled?)within{~..~}
Do you still Remember those reallllly long lines outside the port-A-potty at the freak meets in the farmers field that no one actually bought tickets too - ? . . . or the smell once you got inside !(x)?

From Jim Kin- AKA Shui Tao<(it means the way of water in Chinese) in Hong Kong China.