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PHOTOGRAPHY BY JIMMY FISHBEIN TALENT PATROL Christopher Jobson posts on his blog, Colossal, from a Yvonne Domenge sculpture at Millennium Park. late-night, speak-their-mind techies with websites. The difference is that Colossal struck a real chord. really great "I started by blogging about little design things: a font, a cool logo," Jobson explains. He would occasionally post about a painting, photo, or sculpture that was especially striking; some posts pro- voked his dozen or so followers to repost and retweet until Jobson's original post was bouncing around cyber- space. Then on January 1, 2012, Colossal hit jackpot. the Jobson, 31, blogged about The Obliteration Room, an interactive art INSIGHT Inspiration: Jobson is drawn to artwork that uses repur- posed materials, such as Federico Uribe's use of pencils or coins and Korean artist Yong Ho Ji's creatures of shredded old rubber tires. Bookish: He's covered more than 50 artists who use books, either as building blocks in larger works or altering them to create new art. post installation by Yayoi Kusama in an Australian gallery. His blog post received millions of hits (and still remains the most popular post on the site). Since then, Jobson has written other multimillion-hit posts on art topics such as a kinetic sculpture of San Francisco made of 100,000 toothpicks by artist Scott Weaver and a series of carved book land- scapes by Guy Laramee. Today, each of the 15 to 20 posts uploaded weekly are seen by hundreds of thousands of Web-surfers, and this month the blogger is set to open a Colossal-based retail store in Chicago. It's clear that with his tightly curated selection of posts focused almost exclu- sively on art, Jobson has found a niche in the blogosphere. Now attracting more than three million hits per month as well as Twitter mentions from celebrities such as Neil Patrick Harris, "the name has fulfilled itself over time," says Jobson. When his about The Obliteration Room went viral, the christopher jobson THIS ART-WORLD TASTEMAKER BRANCHES OUT FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE TO A BRICK-AND-MORTAR CHICAGO DESIGN SHOP. BY ELLE EICHINGER C hristopher Jobson calls himself an "art outsider," but there are at least two million people who would disagree: the readers of his runaway hit art-centric blog, thisiscolossal.com (known simply as "Colossal"). A Web designer for a Loop financial firm, Uptown resident Jobson jumped on the blogging bandwagon two years ago and joined countless other 52 MICHIGANAVEMAG.COM Queensland Art Gallery, where the exhibition was housed, credited Colossal for the influx of gallery traf- fic. NYC's famous Art House Co-Op also approached him about curating a mobile version of its Sketchbook Project, for which he will select 1,000 filled sketchbooks from the tens of thousands housed in Co-Op's library space. Called "A Landmark and a Mission," the mobile tour launches in November and will make stops in Ann Arbor, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. Back at home, the blogger's retail concept for Colossal is set to launch this month. For the Colossal retail space, Jobson envisions a museum gift shop of sorts, stocked with design-centric objects such as toys, jewelry, and items for the home; he has a plan with a designer to cre- ate custom-designed Lego kits. The catch: Since Jobson will run the shop from his home, "everything's going to be very tiny," he says, laughing at Colossal-ness is going to be that it's amazing." As for the future, says Jobson, "My dream scenario would be to one day get a gallery space that would run in conjunction with the blog. There's so much room for growth." Indeed, Jobson's blog may be huge now, but it seems it's only getting bigger. thisiscolossal.com MA the irony. "The