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Mindaugas Balčiauskas

69 Times Tumblr Artists Couldn’t Help But Illustrate Something And Totally Nailed It

Tumblr The New Yorker David Karp YAHOO Facebook Instagram

Tumblr has always been a platform where creative people tend to find each other, and the community they built there is unlike anything else on the internet. A big part of that is down to its artists, who made a habit of turning posts they loved into drawings, sketches, and illustrations just for the joy of it.

Below, we’ve put together some of the best examples of this tradition. Scroll down to check them out and upvote your favorite pieces.

#1 Krux

#2 Not The Bees 🐝

#3 Goth Granny

Have you ever had a Tumblr account? If you were online in the early 2010s, you probably remember it well.

It was a world of carefully curated aesthetics, edits of your favorite shows, and fan communities that felt like nothing else on the internet. Celebrities like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Lady Gaga kept their own blogs there, adding to the sense that Tumblr was its own distinct cultural universe.

If you missed it, you missed out on one of the most creative and chaotic corners the internet has ever produced. Sure, Tumblr may not be at its peak anymore, but it has had quite the history. And who knows, it might even be making a comeback.

#4 Sea Lion King

#5 Whap!!! 😂

#6 Baking With Mama

Tumblr was founded by David Karp and launched in New York City in February 2007, when Karp was just 21 years old and working as a consultant from his mother’s apartment.

According to The New Yorker, he envisioned it as an alternative to heavily monetized platforms like Facebook and YouTube, which he felt were stifling user creativity.

He designed it to let people post text, images, GIFs, music, and videos to easily personalized blogs, while deliberately leaving out features like commenting, disliking, and downvoting.

#7 🐦 Credit: Wolfi-Sama

#8 Just Had To

Credit: madeofklay | Tumblr

#9 Geese

What made Tumblr stand out early on was its timing and flexibility. It launched right as everyone was getting smartphones, making it easy to snap a photo and post it instantly.

Sharon Butler, a painter who used Tumblr for her art blog, told The New Yorker it offered something no other platform quite did at the time: more room than Twitter, but a cooler community than Facebook. Long before Instagram existed, Tumblr was already a home for curated imagery and personal expression.

#10 The Monster Mash Is Real!

#11 Vegetables Never Looked So Glamorous

#12 Credit: Jmawork | Ig

The platform grew rapidly, and by 2013 it had 73 million accounts. That same year, Yahoo acquired Tumblr for more than a billion dollars. It seemed like a triumph, but the deal ultimately didn’t deliver.

By 2016, Yahoo wrote down 712 million dollars of that acquisition after Tumblr failed to grow its advertising revenue. When Verizon acquired Yahoo in 2017, Tumblr was bundled under a new parent company called Oath, and the platform’s decline continued.

#13 Plat Plat Plat 🐸

#14 🐍

#15 Be Not Afraid

The biggest blow came in December 2018, when Tumblr issued a blanket ban on adult content, something the platform had become widely known for. According to The New Yorker, it promptly lost thirty percent of its traffic.

The following year, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, acquired Tumblr for a reported three million dollars. A far cry from the billion-dollar deal just six years earlier.

#16 Pallas Cats Are So round

#17 Aura Farming On The Road

#18 You Mean The Proper Amount Of Excited To See Your Cat

Under CEO Jeff D’Onofrio, who led the company from 2018 until 2022, Tumblr took a different approach than most tech companies. Rather than chasing growth at any cost or copying competitors, D’Onofrio has focused on preservation.

Tumblr still supports a wide range of post formats and remains one of the few platforms where users can publish something that actually resembles a blog post.

#19 Kids These Days

#20 A Two-For-One Special

#21 She Was Loving It

So could Tumblr really come back? There are reasons to think so. The users The New Yorker spoke to pointed to things that feel increasingly rare online.

Tumblr’s feed runs in chronological order rather than being shaped by an algorithm. Many accounts are pseudonymous, and the whole experience feels removed from the noise of mainstream social media.

#22 Introducing, Mother Nature And Her Friend Daddy Electric!

#23 ‘Tis The One-Year-Anniversary Of One Of The Best April Fool’s Day Pranks Of All Time

#24 No Gloves. Medical Meowlpractice. 😻 🎨credit: Unsoldibujante | Tumblr

As one user put it, it’s harder to be a brand there. There are no influencers in the way Instagram and TikTok have them, and that might be exactly what makes it appealing again.

According to Tumblr, revenue was up 55 percent since July 2021, with major streaming platforms like Disney, Netflix, and Amazon showing interest in reaching its passionate fan communities.

#25 Cute Doggo🥺

#26 In My Honest Opinion, A Far Better Use Of Their Time

#27 If A Crow Has A Knife, You’d Better Believe They Know How To Use It

Tumblr has always been a platform that defied easy categorization, and that’s a big part of why people keep coming back to it. It was never really about follower counts or going viral.

It was about finding your people and making something just for the joy of making it. That spirit, it turns out, doesn’t really go out of style.