Intrigued by a side project by one of our contributors, I decided to get to the bottom of this irkafirka business…
irkafirka: illustrated tweets. “Anything you say may be taken down and coloured in.” What a great idea, how did the project start?
My old friend Chris challenged me to draw a Twitter-inspired doodle a day and post it. My initial reaction was “I don’t have time for this” but the seed was planted, and I decided it wouldn’t do any harm to try it once. The response was instant and we were both hooked.
Who is irkafirka and why the name?
irkafirka is Nick Hilditch (illustrator, that’s me) and Chris Bell (curator). The name is a Hungarian word meaning doodle. I lived in Budapest for 7 years and speak Hungarian poorly, but its a beautiful word, and I filed it away years ago for future use. Everything about irkafirka came together very spontaneously – the concept, the name, the little dog logo. Everything about it feels right to us.
How did you two hook up and how long have you been in business?
Chris and I have been friends since school, although our lives took us in different directions. It was only through Twitter that we re-ignited our teenage delusions of grandeur. The business relationship is informal – we didn’t start out to make money from the project, we did it for the sheer fun of it. Now it consumes so much of our time and we have such a big audience, we’d love to take it to the next level, but as yet, the means to monetise our success alludes us. One goal we set was to get an irkafirka book published, but we want to get this right rather than rushing into it. We’d love to talk to any interested publishers.
How does the technical side work?
Here’s Chris on the technical side: “It’s a clunky-chunk of social-webbery. The website is built on the Fullscreen template for WordPress. Illustrations are taken from TwitPic and posted along with a picture of the original tweet. The illustrations are automatically cross-posted to our Tumblr page. Each new post updates the RSS feed, which populates the iPhone and Nokia apps automatically. We then add a link to the post on the Facebook page, which also carries other miscellaneous nonsense including a gallery of the 200 most recent illustrations, which are pulled from our Flickr picture stream. We also have various pictures on show in cities around the country using the crazy magic of augmented reality. We use Layar and a back-end system run over in Belgium by our dear friends at Hoppala. Best of all, apart from hosting the website everything we use is totally free. We are a pair of cheapskates…”
How do you decide what tweets to illustrate?
This is the hardest part. The truth is, the vast majority of tweets are utterly banal. It really is just a case of using any means possible to find great visuals, and when I see a tweet I can illustrate I jump straight on it. We look for recommendations from our audience of over 1700 followers, we browse other people’s lists, we search keywords. We do have rules the most important of which is rule 6, “If we stop enjoying it, we’ll stop.” I believe that when a creator is enjoying their work that will come across in the end product, so I’m really just looking for things that amuse me. We also ask that people recommend vivid tweeters to us using the #firkafursday tag, every Thursday. This way, we’ve built up a watch list which occasionally yields results – it’s no guarantee of getting your tweet illustrated, but it almost certainly improves the odds.
If you were to chose anything from my recent tweets to illustrate, what would it be? (go on, do me an illustration… or does that count as a suggestion and will therefore be ignored. pretend I didn’t say anything… it’s all subliminal…)
I had a skim through your recent timeline. As is often the case, most of your tweets are either parts of conversations with little meaning out of context, or links. We’re all for wilfully taking things out of context. To this day, one of my personal favourites is “The oven’s broken. I’ll have to get the bloke out”. A very important part of what we do is the element of surprise – we don’t like the subject to know they’re going to get firked. You can commission an illustration, but technically, a commission wouldn’t be an irkafirka. It would simply be a work by the artists behind irkafirka. And it wouldn’t be free.
You try to post daily but of course real life gets in the way… when is an irkafirka more important – what would prompt you to miss a favourite film in favour of an illustration?
irkafirka has become a compulsion for me. If I miss a day, I feel more pressure to make sure I deliver something the next. On a day when I’m busy and can’t see when I’ll be able to produce something, I’m agitated. Usually we try and let our followers know when it’s a rule 5 day (that’s the rule that let’s us off the hook due to other commitments), but I never like to rule it out. My wife has been incredibly patient. A favourite film is a good example of something I wouldn’t miss, though. I’m a bit of an old school cineaste.
Nick: you used to live in Hungary. Why on earth did you come back to the UK, and what do you miss most about Hungary?
I loved living in Hungary, and I haven’t ruled out moving back. I miss my friends there, the long hot summers and the bableves (bean soup). I came back because I was finding it increasingly difficult to find relevant work. My wife is Hungarian, so we go back as often as possible. People often say “yours is a job you could do from anywhere” which is true to some extent, but to find the work you usually need to get out there and meet the clients. The dream is that one day my work will be so much in demand, I’ll be able to live where I want. So start demanding, demanders.
You also jacked in a career at a digital agency to become a freelance artist. What prompted this move and has it been a success? What’s the best job you’ve worked on so far, and has Irkafirka got you any jobs?
Working at a digital agency was interesting, and I got to work on a lot of great brands. I even helped them win 2 BAFTAs. However, I was there for over 4 years and the work was beginning to feel repetitious. I also wanted to develop my own IP so that I’d have work would that generate an income for me. I didn’t quit because of irkafirka, but it did give me confidence in my own work and helped me build up a portfolio that wasn’t exclusively comprised of other people’s brands. irkafirkas are drawn quickly, in a single sitting, with little or no advance planning, so they’re frequently full of mistakes, but as with great music, I like to think that this is compensated for by the energy put into them. When showing my portfolio, it is the work that generates the most interest. As irkafirka is a significant part of my portfolio, I like to think it’s played a part in all the work I’ve picked up since I started freelancing. The only paid work that’s resulted directly from irkafirka is a side-project for Nokia where we draw illustrations based on comments from the official Nokia blog. It’s too early to say whether it’s been a success, but I certainly don’t regret it, and it’s very hard to imagine going back.
How can someone get hold of an irkafirka print, and which ones would you recommend as christmas presses for specific members of the family?
Selling prints wasn’t initially part of the plan, but the demand was there, so we set up a shop at Zazzle. They’re most frequently bought by the subject, so the market is fairly limited, but we’re looking for ways to make irkafirka-based products with a broader appeal in the new year. The images that make it into the shop are added on the basis that somebody expressed an interest in buying them, rather than because we necessarily think they’re the best works. However, based on what’s there already, here’s my handy irkafirka shopping list that’s surely better than the tired recommendations you’ll find on Amazon.
For your Mum: @BangsandaBun
For your Dad: @BruceandSimon
For your Grandparent: @Whatleydude
For your dirty uncle: @bennycrime
If you find something on irkafirka that isn’t in the shop, and you’d like to buy a copy, just let us know and we’ll upload it. Happy Christmas!
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Alas, I broke the rules, so I have yet to inspire my own illustrated tweet… although I’m fairly sure that a quick glance through tweets produced in the 24 hours previous to Nick completing this Q&A could have turned up a few goodies (let’s just gloss over the fact that the best was a retweet, okay?)
Best go put the hob on in the kitchen so I can spread them around a bit. (Hob to keep me warm, bloody arctic down there)
RT @PennyRed I am a tiny protesting icicle. A protesticle.
have not left house for nearly three days. or seen anyone. I am a hermit.
pah! I wouldn’t miss it that much, I just went out for food supplies and my face nearly fell off – staying put now
I live in hope that one day I will be deemed worthy…
Written by Amelia Gregory on Friday December 10th, 2010 12:25 pm
Categories ,#firkafursday, ,Apps, ,Budapest, ,Bulgarian, ,Chris Bell, ,Flickr, ,hashtag, ,Hoppala, ,Hungarian, ,illustration, ,iPhone, ,irkafirka, ,Layar, ,Nick Hilditch, ,Nokia, ,Tumblr, ,Twitpic, ,twitter, ,Zazzle
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