I feel animated, even a little mad

I’ve received many compliments on my new Twitter avatar.

These compliments are nice, and yet I feel like I’m cheating in accepting them because the avatar took no creativity on my part whatsoever. In fact, you can have a very similar avatar (or iPhone background or Facebook picture or desktop background) in a few minutes.

Use this: Mad Men Yourself.

This fine gadget is part of the promotion for the third season of AMC’s Mad Men — one of my favorite television programs. (UPDATE: For more about the pervasiveness of this promotion, see this from the New Yorker: “Poster girls.”)

I particularly like this gadget because it uses the artwork of Dyna Moe, a performer and artist in NYC who started drawing scenes from Mad Men season 2, just on a whim, and posting them to her Flickr account and her blog.

What’s nice about this story is that AMC didn’t send her a cease and desist letter. It seemed that the people on Mad Men, and in particular the show’s creator, Matt Weiner, really loved her artwork. They invited her to meet them and other important AMC folks, and to come along when Jon Hamm was guest hosting Saturday Night Live, and so on and so on.

It may have helped that she’s a performer in the Upright Citizen’s Brigade and knew some of the actors via that. But mostly I believe it’s because her art is clever and awesome, and because she wasn’t afraid to put things out for people to see and enjoy. Carpe diem and all that.

You can read all about this and more on Dyna Moe’s blog, I Let My Fists Do the Talking.

I made another Mad Men me, which I’ll start using next week when the new season premieres. Swanky, eh?