Hello my friends,
A slight deviation from our regular programming this week — thank you to everyone who sent well wishes to our family after my last note, it is truly appreciated.
And for all the parents out there, much respect!
Things are slowly ramping back up here, excited to share some updates with you all.
This Week’s Visual
“Iterate.”
I’ve been playing with some new visualization software, thinking through the VV style constraints that would need to exist in order to create recognizable work in a field that’s full of mind-blowing talent. It’ll likely come to life via some collaborations with already brilliant 3D artists. Watch this space.
$GENERALIST
Via the magic of Twitter DMs, I had the distinct pleasure of collaborating with Mario Gabriele of The Generalist on their S-1 report for the Coinbase IPO. Mario and his team did an incredible job of breaking down the story, and I produced three complimentary VV visuals.
This mini-venture was crowd funded via Mirror, a publishing platform that allows writers to build economic infrastructure around their work by giving them the ability to issue tokens to their readers, and mint their work as assets that can accrue real value.
We launched last Sunday and were able to raise 20 ETH in 31 minutes. Crypto is a different animal.
We also received a small mention in Jason Zweig’s Intelligent Investor column in The Wall Street Journal.
I think Mario’s write-up introducing our collaboration does a brilliant job of explaining how this decentralized model will make new and interesting things happen in the world of media, you can read it here.
The final piece will be out tomorrow, I’ll be sure to share on Twitter.
Running Experiments
All of these new methods of monetization (and overwhelming presence in the zeitgeist) led me to experiment with a couple of new ideas this week:
Experiment 1:
Visualize Value Boosters:
“Genesis” — 10 piece limited edition digital collectibles. Auctioned blindly over a 24 hour period, revealed once the last auction closed. We sold them all, thank you to all who collected and amplified!
I worked with good friend and “10x creator” (h/t Justin Mikolay) Traf to build the custom site you see above. Here’s a video of our process with a soothing soundtrack:
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Experiment 2:
“Commission” — an open auction to work with me to produce a VV original.
I am quite fascinated by the price discovery mechanisms that this new medium is going to keep pushing.
Happy Sexy Millionaire
Pleased to announce a collaboration with the notorious Steven Bartlett on his new book “Happy Sexy Millionaire.”
Steven’s story (and subsequent insight) is wildly impressive. He built a 9 figure business by age 25, only to realize that most of what he’d previously defined as “success” was completely wrong:
Extra Curricular
“Urban Outlaw is a portrait of Magnus Walker, the rebel Porsche customizer who turned a hobby into an obsession, and an obsession into a successful business.”
If I wasn’t drawing pictures on the internet, this is what I’d like to be doing.
Until next time, I appreciate you.
JB
urban outlaw is fucking dope.
3D Space. Noted.