Matthew Inman - Marketing and Design

My Mother's Monsters

Matthew Inman — 2008-07-29T12:37:53+01:00

When most people think of Ann Inman's monsters, they probably picture my siblings and I. In this case, however, I'm referring to AnnsMonsters.com - a website I created for my mom to showcase sock monsters she creates herself.

Each monster is hand made from socks and costs around $30.00. They're 90% cute, 10% evil.

Dating a Zombie & Tyrannosaurus Rex

Matthew Inman — 2008-07-25T11:05:24+01:00

Yesterday was exciting. I launched ZombieHarmony - a Free Dating site for Zombies.

I thought by now that the whole zombie joke had gotten old, but apparently I was wrong. The website launched and was a tremendous success - nearly 200,000 page views in the first day. I had a ton of fun writing it, too, and I kind of got back into the zombie swing of things while creating profiles for zombie singles. I didn't put much effort into the design itself, so it ended up looking a lot like the original original Mingle² website - except zombified.

Next up is something I made a few weeks ago that is equally as weird:

This is a very useful read if you were considering dating that particular type of dinosaur.

Types of bad kissers

Matthew Inman — 2008-07-09T17:13:55+01:00

Kissing is not always great. In fact sometimes it's downright terrible. To illustrate my point, I put together a comic strip for Mingle² that depicts different types of bad kissers.

It was something quick I whipped up, but it's recieved nearly 100,000 visitors over the past couple of weeks.

On a similar note, today Mingle2 launched a new survey:

The survey is simple: it asks you how many people you've had sex with and then tells you how you compare with other people who are the same age as you. Talking about your "number" is considered taboo, so the idea behind this quiz is to provide an anonymous way to find out where you stand in terms of promiscuity.

The State of the Web - Summer 2008

Matthew Inman — 2008-07-07T11:09:09+01:00

Last year I put together a 2007 collage of things that were happening on the web. I didn't illustrate any of it, I just used text and a few simple images.

I wanted to create another one this year, but this time get a bit more creative. Several coffees and a few billion mouseclicks later, I give you:

I drew everything on that page, with the exception of the twitter bird that's in the cockpit of the burning airplane.

Also, props to this post at WebDesignerWall for the inspiration behind the "design" section of the collage.

How I Almost Got in Wired Magazine ... Twice

Matthew Inman — 2008-05-23T11:29:04+01:00

This blog post is all wrong. It should be titled: "How I got in wired magazine twice ... and now I'm rich and famous and I get laid ten times a day on top of a giant pile of diamonds which I rightfully deserve."

Unfortunately, that's not the case. The truth is I never got in Wired Magazine, although I came damn close on two separate occasions which happened about three years apart. For those of you that have spent the past 20 years living in someone's basement chained to a rusty water heater, Wired Magazine is a big freakin deal. They have a worldwide circulation of 700,000 readers and are considered the Forbes/Playboy/Guns-n-ammo of the technology industry.

"So what the f**k happened?" you might ask. Did I drop too many f-bombs during the interview, or make uncomfortable glances at the reporter's junk? No, the only one I can blame is perhaps myself or Wired magazine being for being rather fickle. I'm more inclined, however, to just blame the universe itself for cheating me out of my destiny.

1. The first time I had an opportunity to be in wired was in 2003 when Brad Stone, a freelance writer for Wired and other publications, wanted to do a piece on Search Engine Optimization and use SEOmoz as a case study. At the time SEOmoz hadn't hit the big time yet, and there were still only three employees: myself, Rand Fishkin, and his mother, Gillian. The reporter interviewed Rand and Gillian, and when it was my turn to be interviewed he simply asked: "Do you do SEO?" "No," I responded, "I write code." That pretty much concluded the interview. This was one of those key moments where verbosity REALLY could have helped me. Instead of elaborating on all the energy I put into on-page SEO for our client's website, or the countless hours I spent configuring mod_perl have pretty URLs that were SEO-friendly, I screwed it all up and responded with "No, I write code." I might as well have said "I don't speak english, you ass-mango" - the amount of coverage he would have given me would have probably been about the same.

Wired ended up rejecting the article, and so the author pitched it to Newsweek instead who printed it a few weeks later (link). It made no mention of me, obviously, and the accompanying photo only showed Rand and Gillian. None of this was a huge surprise, but the opening paragraph is really what got me:

Then the owners(shoe-store.net) hired a Seattle consultant named Rand Fishkin, who performed an obscure procedure called a "search-engine optimization." Fishkin built a new, easy-to-use Web store at a new address, shoe-store.net, and rewrote the shoe descriptions so that they were clearly visible to the Web's major search engines, which scour the Internet and index its content.

Reading that initially made me want to go to the park down the street and start strangling chipmunks, bathing in the cathartic slaughter of adorable forest creatures. I built the website, I coded the front-end and site architecture to be search engine optimized, I spent 7 months constructing that massive debacle, the last month of which I was putting 60+ hour work weeks to get it launched on time. All that work and no credit, simply because I didn't speak up.

In Rand's defense, I remember overhearing a phone conversation between him and a photographer from wired, where he told her that it was really important that they include my photo in the magazine. His suspicions were inline with mine - I was going to get no mention in the article, so it was cool of him to make the effort to try and at least get me in the photo.

2. The second time I almost got in wired was much more recent. I was mid-2007 and Chris Null wanted to write a piece on SEO where he would hire an SEO firm to improve the search rankings for his website, FilmCritic. In addition, his website badly needed a redesign, so the idea was we would do SEO and web design for him for free and he would write about it in Wired, covering both the design and marketing aspects. He'd gotten official sign off from Wired that they would run the article, so we agreed and went along with it.

So I re-designed FilmCritic (screenshot) and provided Chris with the necessary deliverables (html/css) to integrate the new design into his website. I then designed, coded, and launched linkbait that got him ranked for "movie reviews" at Google, which is a very competitive keyword.

A few months went by and we kept hearing that Wired was delaying the article. By April 2008 it was safe to assume it was never going to happen. Apparently Wired canned it due to someone else writing something similar, I'm still not exactly sure what the details were. I think Wired is just insanely picky. I'm in no way blaming Chris Null from FilmCritic for what happened - I knew he did everything he could to get it published.

The moral of this lukewarm tale is this: follow your dreams, shoot for the stars, and don't get screwed sideways by bad luck and picky magazine editors.

India - Dirt, Diarrhea, and Death

Matthew Inman — 2008-05-13T08:27:27+01:00

India is a nightmare. I'm a fairly open-minded guy and I know making generalizations about an entire country based on a tiny bit of experience is probably an unfair judgement, but fuck it - I'm gonna run with it: India is a nightmare. The week I spent in Delhi and Varanassi gave me enough empirical evidence to confidently label it as a sun-scorched, scabbed asshole of a country which, unless forcibly sent, I will never visit again.

11 seconds. 11 miserable, 110 degree fahrenheit (43C), seconds. That's the approximate amount of time I had between rickshaw drivers asking me if I needed a ride. In case you're unaware, a rickshaw is a two-wheeled cart which carries two persons and is pulled by a third person. Rickshaws are very common in highly populated areas of third world countries. In Varanasi, one of the cities my brother and I spent the day backpacking around, the Rickshaw drivers saw us as an ideal target to sell their services to. Imagine walking down the street with a 60lb pack on in 110F heat and being asked if you needed a lift from a total stranger, every 11 seconds, for 8 hours. At one point I had two rickshaw drivers on either side of me trying to get me to ride with them, I was so busy trying to get around them that I almost stepped in a large pile of feces that was mixed with blood. In addition to the rickshaw drivers, merchants, beggars, and scam-artists would constantly approach us to try and sell us tours or trinkets. That day my brother and I spent in Varanasi, we were approached by probably more than 40 strangers; all of them speaking broken english asking where we were from, how we were doing, and other typical conversation starters. Of those 40+ people, every single one of them was purely feeding us bullshit in order to try and sell us something. After the first hour or two we wouldn't even respond, I'd just stare straight ahead. I remember sitting on some steps while Bryce went inside to use an ATM. An indian man came and sat down next to me and politely asked how my day was. I stared straight ahead and and blatantly ignored him. If this asshole was going to insult my intelligence by pretending to make conversation with me and then trying to sell me a snow-globe of the taj mahal, I wasn't even going to bother making eye contact. He'll earn eye contact when he figures out how to make a decent living instead of scamming tourists. Even sitting down in Varnassi was a chore; usually a small crowd would form - some people would just stare at us because we were white, others would try and sell us more useless shit. At one point during the day we started to desperately look for a restaurant, not so much to escape the heat or because we were hungry, but simply so that we could get away from the locals. We also tried to stick near the river because there were less people to bother us there. This is also where I saw a teenager pelting rocks at an injured dog, resulting in the animal yelping and crying as it tried to run away. Local entertainment, I guess.

Varanasi is a city where people go to die. Being a holy city, it is where the sick or dying voyage to in order to bathe in the Ganges river, a river ripe with feces, garbage, and ash from the bodies we watched them burn upshore. Varanasi is what a garbage dump would look like if you set it on fire and built temples around it and then populated it with homeless lepers and malaria victims.

Trying to enjoy the temples and historical sites in Varnassi is impossible. Most of the temples are surrounded with beggars and "guides" who will show you around for a fee. We had one beggar who didn't speak any english but refused to leave us alone, demanding that he show us where the temples were by frantically pointing and yelling in Hindi. My brother, who is notoriously even-tempered, became so frustrated and angry at this man he dumped his water bottle on him to get him to leave us alone.

Early in the day we rented a rowboat to go up the Ganges river and see the various ghats and funeral pyres. This was after arguing with our black-toothed cab driver who demanded he drive us around all day and be our tour guide. Trying to get a boat resulted in the usual bullshit where they jacked up the price 10x because we were tourists. After we got on the boat, an adorable little girl got on and began lighting candles and handing them to me so I could put them in the river. "How novel," I thought, "this must be some kind of Ganges tradition." After she'd lit 8 candles, she stuck out her hand and demanded money. My brother and I, unaware that this costed money, gave her some spare change. She insisted that we didn't give her enough and after we told her we weren't giving her anymore, this 7 year old girl's expression turned to a murderous scowl and she shuffled off our boat. It was interesting to see a child get so enraged and hateful over money. Later on we ended up going to a temple. I approached an altar where a man was putting necklaces on people and red dots on their forehead. He gestured for me to come over and I obliged, at which point he dotted me and gave me a necklace. "How novel," I thought, "this must be some kind of fancy temple tradition." He then demanded money. My brother gave him more than enough and he angrily demanded more. Getting outside the temple they demanded more money for watching our shoes while we were inside. Leaving this temple all I could think about was wanting to wipe that red dot from my forehead and then strangling them with the cheap neckacle they'd put around my neck. It became pretty clear that if you're white and in India you're seen as a wallet with legs.

Sitting in the train station in Varanasi was quite an experience. We decided it would be better to wait for our train 4 hours early rather than endure walking around the city anymore. While waiting in the busy station a cow walked by, and a few minutes later another cow walked by - this time on the train tracks. No one really seemed bothered by the fact that a farm animal was wandering around. Nor were they bothered when a starved, possibly rabid dog that was foaming at the mouth wandered around the station, occasionally attracting the affection of small children who wanted to pet it. There was also a "spit corner," which was an area near the entrance that everyone would hawk loogies into. One woman even brought her daughter over to the spit corner, a cross-eyed girl wearing a neck brace, who used it as a toilet instead of spitting into it. Being in the station for several hours, the spit corner was actually quite amusing to watch. There was a large mound of cockroaches that would slowly grow and bustle out of hole in the spit corner until someone else came by and spat into it, at which point they would all scatter back down inside it. It was sort of like a fun game - see how many roaches appear between indian spitters! Being white and sitting down my brother and I attracted a lot of attention, often times people would just stand over us and stare down - taking in the amazing site of a white person (I guess?). When I got a bloody nose from the dry, dirty air it didn't make me any less obvious. A little girl approached me and begged for money. I gave her some cookies I had in my bag. Soon after a small crowd of kids formed around me, all begging for food or money. I ignored them and stared straight ahead, even after they started snapping their fingers in my face and waving trash at me. Later a beggar with no legs hobbled over to us, moaning and pointing at his mouth. Outside the station I saw two little girls: maybe 3 and 5 years old, sitting in a large pile of garbage sucking on all the empty soda bottles.

Before going to Varanasi, we stayed in Delhi for a few days. If Varanasi is the dirty butthole of India, then Delhi is the bigger, dirtier butthole of India. In terms of garbage, sickness, suffering - Delhi is the undisputed champ, save for Mumbai. One morning Bryce left our hotel room to find a dead man lying in in the street. His legs were covered in scabs and his eyes had rolled back in his head, and a small cloud of flies had begun to swarm around his body. The locals squatted near him in a semi-circle, apparently indifferent to the body blistering in the sun. Everyone picks their noses in India, and I think their national pastime is hawking loogies. You seriously can't walk 50 feet without hearing someone revving up their sinuses in order to launch a tikki-masala-flavored snotball at the nearest pile of flaming garbage. The traffic is insane: there are no real rules so it's kind of survival of the fittest. You'll have cyclists mixed with goats mixed with buses mixed with three legged dogs. One time while stopped in traffic a little girl ran across the other lane in between roaring traffic to my rickshaw. The whites of her eyes were yellow and she was trying to sell me pens for a few rupees a piece.

Diarrhea. Oh yes, endless gallons of diarrhea. If liquid feces was flammable there would be no energy crisis thanks to India. The first time I got sick my brother and I were at an internet cafe and I suddenly realized there was a hydroplane race brewing in my lower intestine. The internet cafe had no bathroom, so I left my brother to go search for one. After going into various restaurants and hotels with no luck, a man approached me trying to sell me something. He asked what I was looking for and I said I needed to use the toilet. He laughed and asked: "big or little?," gesturing at my crotch for little and my butt for big. "Big," I said, resulting in an eruption of even more laughter from this little Indian man. Soon I was being led from one hotel to the other, all of which resulted in him speaking Hindi to the owner asking if I could use the toilet. After a few failed attempts and a loss of dignity on my part, he eventually led me down a dark alley full of half-naked indian kids who were bathing in a broken water spout. I ended up being led into a bathroom that looked like a small meat locker with a giant latch on the outside. "Spectacular," I thought, "he's going to lock me in here and then fill it with cobras, perhaps demanding 100 rupees per cobra to be removed." After taking the most awkward, nervous dump of my life, I quickly wiped and ended up chafing my butt really bad. I left the scary toilet-meat-locker to find the indian man waiting for me. I gave him 100 rupees for helping me out, and he led me out of the alley, but stopped short at a small room. "Come inside the room," he said, "I want to have a nice chat with you." At which point another man came up behind me and tried to block the door so I would be forced to step inside. "Hell no," I said, and ran with the speed and determination only a man riddled with chafed butt-cheeks and terror is capable of.

Opium is fairly common in India, and while shopping for camera batteries in an underground bazaar I mistakenly took a breath while walking through a clowd of grey smoke at the front of a shop. I remember instantly feeling dizzy and uneasy, I felt uncomfortably high and thought maybe being underground in that dirty bazaar was affecting me. We left the bazaar and went to a coffee shop. I went to the bathroom and my nose began to pour blood and despite the air conditioning I was sweating through my clothes. Sitting there with toilet paper pressed up against my nose, I could also feel my bowels preparing to ride another greasy gastrointestinal wave of my-soon-to-be-favorite-D-word. It was here that I truly began to understand an Indian vacation: It's not a vacation at all, it's an assault on the body, mind, and bowels.

Vomiting on the Himalayas was uncomfortable. We'd left India and flown to Nepal, which was a first world paradise in comparison. My brother and I had signed up for an overnight trek in the valleys below the Himalayan range. About 2 hours into it I started to feel incredibly queasy. I had pretty bad diarrhea that morning (I had diarrhea almost every morning) but I'd managed to bottle it up using Pepto bismol and Immodium. Unfortunately the nausea couldn't be contained, and I managed to hike up steep mountain trails for nearly 2 hours while vomiting until we reached a village that had a lodge for trekkers. Upon entering the lodge I immediately laid down on a covered porch while a lightning storm raged through the valley around me. Shivering and acting like a giant pansy, the nepalese family who ran the lodge gave me food and some blankets. I became a Matt-Inman-Burrito and spent the night there. The next morning I was well enough that we continued our trek up the mountain.

Matt-Inman Burrito, complete with red barf-bucket

After Nepal we had one more night to spend in India before our flight back to the states. I booked the most expensive hotel in town and decided to hide near the pool all day. I took a short trip out of the hotel with Bryce to do some shopping, and I saw a man whose foot had rotted off (most of it, anyway). Most of his toes were missing and he sat there in the dirt nonchalantly picking at his own flesh, which was covered in a large swarm of flies. It was surprising to see him sitting there without even a hint of pain in his expression. My brother suggested that the foot may have been so rotten that he couldn't feel it anymore.

Getting home was rough: over 30 hours of travel time and a myriad of buses, taxis, and airplanes. Being back in Seattle now, thousands of miles from rickshaws, the runs, and all the other sensory rape India had to offer, I feel righteous saying this: F**K you, India. May your rivers run black with the watery stool of a thousand culture-shocked tourists. May your cows get hit by trains. May your cockroaches choke under the waves of phlegm flooding your spit corners. And may I never, ever see you again.

Google Woes and Traveling to Japan, India, and Nepal

Matthew Inman — 2008-04-15T14:14:49+01:00

First off, I published a post on SEOmoz today about my quiz/widget-bait and the Google penalty we received on JustSayHi for including keyword-rich links in widgets, going after spammy keywords, and poorly handling our reconsideration request. You can view the post here: Widgetbait gone wild.

The post was intended to drum up a discussion about acceptable linking behavior in widgets, as well as possibly get feedback on JustSayHi being banned and what we should do to recover from that debacle. So far the response has been tremendous: it's currently received almost 200 comments and is ranked as one of the most popular posts on SEOmoz. The feedback has been pretty positive, too. I was expecting a public beating for some of the mistakes that were made, but everyone is mostly supportive and appreciative of the fact that I owned up to our cash advance blunder.

Secondly, tomorrow I leave for a lengthy trip to Asia. I'm traveling with my brother in law (Adam) for part of the trip, and my brother Bryce for the second half. I'm going to Japan with Adam - we're starting in Tokyo and I'm staying in Shinjuku again. I'll be telecommuting while I'm in Tokyo, so I'll still be very responsive to emails and whatnot. After Tokyo we're heading to Okinawa for a few days, where hopefully I can get in some surfing and we can check out some cultural sites. Adam just got his black belt in karate, so Okinawa should be very interesting to him as it's where that form of martial arts was born.

After Okinawa I'm flying to India (with a short layover in China), and Adam returns to Seattle. My brother Bryce has been working in India for the past several weeks on a medical clerkship - he's a third year med student and joined a program that sent him to India to work. He's been emailing us updates about the stuff he's doing and it sounds like some crazy story out of a movie: driving jungle jeeps through narrow mountain roads to remote himalayan villages, setting up medical camps, and providing medical treatment to lines of hundreds of Indian kids. After his med stuff is done, he's going to be in Delhi on April 27th and I'm going to meet up with him. We're gonna do the brotherly Darjeeling Limited thing and tour around the country on trains, except it won't be nearly as crappy as a Wes Anderson film (sorry, I'm like the only guy who hates Wes Anderson films and I'm sticking to it. Although the life aquatic was ok, mostly because they played Sigur Ros at the end of the movie).

Once India is complete, we're gonna catch a flight to Nepal and do some trekking around the country. The plan there is to get out of Kathmandu as soon as possible and go do some hiking in the Himalayas. I'm kind of nervous about the Nepal part of the trip because things have been kind of unstable there lately due to the Maoists getting rather unfriendly with tourists. I'm also worried about getting sick. I've taken all the appropriate medications (typhoid, hepatitis, etc), but I'm still concerned I'll get a stomach flu or something like that.

I'll be gone until May 9th. I'll be active on email for the beginning of the trip, but my cell phone doesn't work in Asia so if you leave me a voicemail I won't get it until I return.

One final thing: I'm planning on blogging/drawing a lot more when I return from my voyage. In addition to preparing for this trip, I also bought a townhouse a few weeks ago so I've been busy dealing with that. Preparing for a trans-pacific adventure, buying a house, and doing lots of very-not-fun-google-type-work hasn't left much interest or room for creativity lately.

8 Artists Who Inspire Me

Matthew Inman — 2008-03-24T23:28:51+01:00

These are a few of my favorite artists I've collected from around the web listed in no particular order.

Mark Ryden

Gruesome, bizarre, and incredibly inspirational. Mark Ryden does amazing work. Link

Yannick Puig

The music video above is best described as insanely, unbelievably, ludicrously creative. The artist behind it is a guy named Yannick Puig. Link

Kurt Halsey

Illustration at its finest: elegant, simple, and beautiful. Link

Matt Dangler

I love his weird take on x-men and other comic book characters. Link

Zdzislaw Beksinski

Zdzislaw Beksinski was pointed out to me by a co-worker a few days ago and I instantly loved his work. Most of his stuff is darker fantasy. Link

Vladimir Kush

This guy does wonderful surrealistic paintings.Link

Michel GagnÃ©

If you get a chance check out his Frenzied Fauna. I love the exaggerated features of his monsters and critters. Link

Scott Saw

Link

A Bear with a Mullet.

Matthew Inman — 2008-03-14T00:07:04+01:00

Last week I asked you guys to choose something for me to draw in the blog comments, and I picked a winner: A bear with a mullet. Thanks to Carlos for the excellent idea. His comment made me bust up laughing when I read it :)

Carlos didn't specify that the bear should be angry, but the way I see it - if I was a bear and I had a mullet, I'd be pretty pissed.