Barely two months after its inception, the “Up Up” (舉牌小人) app designed by Haniboi Lee (李翰) has received an overwhelming response, logging more than 900,000 people using the app through either the Web site or Facebook shares.
The app produces small figures with different-colored attire and hairstyles, each holding up yellow plaques which spell the sentence or word that the user has typed out in the message box on the Web site. The image may later be shared to Facebook or Twitter accounts.
In a recent article in the Chinese-language magazine Business Next, the 32-year-old Lee, who goes by the Internet ID of “Haniboi,” was quoted as saying that he has always liked how fans raised their own hand-made cards at ball games and “the positive attitude of encouragement to others” that it conveyed.
Photo: Yan Hsin-yu, Taipei Times
After he kept the idea tucked away in the back of his mind for a long time, he was quoted in the article as saying that the catalyst that prompted him to start on the project had been the first nationwide anti-nuclear rally in March.
Lee said he felt many of the slogans and pictures at the rally were too serious and it got him thinking about how to give a different feel to the same anti-nuclear appeal.
He posted the first draft of “Up Up” on his blog, with the small figures holding up cards reading: “Haniboi says No Nuke.”
“I agreed to make the same pictures for other netizens who left their names in the response forum,” the article quoted Lee as saying.
Lee studied design in England and then started his own studio — primarily working with illustrations — before finally moving back to Taiwan, because his design work necessitated constant travel between England and Taiwan.
According to Lee, there was no generator program at the time, and every figure, plaque and character had to be positioned manually, adding that he never expected to receive over 500 posts on the blog, requesting that names and messages be rendered.
“The responses gave me confidence, and it seemed that many people seemed to like this kind of thing,” Lee was quoted as saying in the article.
According to the article, the concept was further evolved after discussion with Hsu Chen (徐震), a friend Lee met in England and the founder of Zeczec, a crowdfunding site, and the two decided to work together to come up with the current generator program.
The project raised a total of NT$150,000 (US$5,000) on the crowdfunding site, three times the original goal of NT$50,000, the article said, adding that the team is now moving toward the end goal for the first phase of the project and merchandizing.
Postcards were made available this month, and T-shirts, stickers and cellphone cases are due to be produced by the end of the year, according to the article, which added that CMP Group have been given the rights to build 30 1.2m tall statues of the app’s figurines to be located in Greater Taichung.
The beta version of the app, made available in May and originally only a trial run, was rapidly popularized within several hours and reached a staggering 60,000 uses that very night, the article added.
Lee was quoted by the article as saying that the Internet has been the sole reason the app has been so popular, adding that though it conformed to his original idea — hence the links to share the images to Facebook and Twitter, as well as designing two separate sizes, one for Facebook cover photos and another for personal use — he still did not expect the idea to take off so quickly.
While the program generating the figures for the app also made it more appealing due to the ease of use and the fun factor, Lee said he was aware that such a program would not keep the attention of fans for long.
“We intend to take the design process at a slower pace,” the article quoted Lee as saying, adding that he wanted to make a revision to the program and maybe even an app game based on the figures to maintain fans’ interest in the project.
“Back in the day, if you wanted your works to be known, you had to hold individual expositions or print out the works,” he was quoted as saying, commenting on how the Internet has changed the design industry.
Business overheads are practically nil if utilizing the Internet, Lee said, adding that once the author had a solid fan base, “the fans themselves would become the media once it gets to a certain level: If you have 20,000 to 30,000 fans following your projects, [that is the amount of people who can fit] into multiple Taipei Arenas.”
According to the article, the Walt Disney Company has recently approached Lee and asked him to design several new figurines based on the characters of the Lone Ranger.
Lee cited the Disney approach as yet another example of how the his industry is being turned around, saying: “The Internet allows us to completely bypass media advertising, and instead makes the media come to us.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching