alton
Alton Brown of Food Network had strong feelings against Twitter, but an even greater aversion to Facebook. When his agent demanded he choose one, he picked what he felt was the lesser of two evils and began tweeting.
Right off the bat, it felt like a bad fit. He hated the Twitter app on his smartphone. And he was frustrated by the 140 character limit. So he went rogue.
And analog.
To spice up his twittering, he began hand-writing notes, then posting pictures of them. Sometimes he’d doodle a message in Morse code. Or draw a sketch. Or set half of a paper message on fire, then tweet a photo of the remnants.
"I didn’t set out to be difficult," he says. "I just wanted to have more fun."
He still sent out some text-based tweets, but one day, he made a fatal mistake. He used the wrong form of your/you’re, and a grammar fiend in the Twittersphere called him out on it.
A [boycott of sorts](https://twitter.com/altonbrown/status/213321210153537537) resulted. “I said, for the next 30 days, I’ll only tweet what I can \[hand\] write," Alton describes. "And people really seemed to go gaga for it.”
His 30-day paper-only project started with a [self portrait](http://via.me/-22f1eta) and ran for a month, but the hand-drawn and written tweets were so popular that he kept it up. And now his feed is almost exclusively photos of Post-it note sketches and scribbles. Tweet him a question, and you’ll see a hand-written response posted next to your tweet on his monitor. Request a drawing, and you might get a sketched image of Food Network star Giada De Laurentiis crying beside a dead unicorn, or Brown grilling a dead Barney the purple dinosaur. Ask him what *Dr. Who*’s Daleks would need to make a soufflé, and you’ll get a doodle with a punch line.
Brown isn’t an artist by training, but he has a lot of experience drawing from his days as a director. Before he attended culinary school and became a member of the Food Network empire, he spent most of his career as a commercial director, storyboarding dialog-heavy spots for products from tires to insurance to baby food.
Now, more than a year after joining Twitter (minus a small hiatus when he got angry because an imposter was tweeting as his wife) he gets about 1,000 messages and requests a day from his over 400,000 followers. And the popularity of his responses is leading to a surprising activity: People have started bidding on them, even though he hasn't offered them for sale.
One fan tweeted an offer to pay $300 for a single sketch on a post-it. “I haven’t accepted so far, but people are actively bidding on some of them,” he says. “Trust me, I’ve been tempted. If things get tight around here…”
Brown keeps the doodles in a Ziploc bag, but in the last few days, he’s also started moving some of the nearly 600 messages to Tumblr. You can check out his gallery-style collection at [Analog Tweets.](http://analogtweets.tumblr.com/) Some fans have suggested a book, while another suggested he illustrate a children’s book on food. Only problem?
“I can’t draw.”
We disagree.
*All photos courtesy Alton Brown.*
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