By JUSTIN STORY, The Bowling Green Daily News

Thursday, September 29, 2011 11:43 AM CDT

For being one of the most simplistic artistic statements, the stick figure holds a lot of promise for Hitcents. The Bowling Green software developer and online marketing company launched Draw a Stickman last week - a website that is part creative outlet, part promotional tool.

Ed Mills, chief financial officer for Hitcents, said the concept came about as a way to market the company in an innovative fashion. Within 40 hours of the site’s launch Sept. 21, the site had netted 1 million visits and is now approaching 5 million visits from users around the world.

“What’s happened is we’ve received such an overwhelming response from people all over the world wanting to use our creativity and our design,” Mills said. “We’ve gotten a thousand emails from people about how much they love the product and how much fun they have.”

Users who find the site are encouraged to draw a stick figure using their computer mouse. The figure then comes to life on the computer screen and goes on an adventure. When the stick figure comes upon an obstacle, users are encouraged to draw other objects to help get their character out of trouble.

At the end of the animation, the message “be creative every day” appears at the bottom of the screen.

Users are then encouraged to share their animated adventure on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter or through email, and they have the option of changing the message at the end before sharing it.

Draw a Stickman was created by Phil Williams, a Web developer for Hitcents. Williams hit on the concept of a stick figure coming to life about a year and a half ago as a different way of promoting the company. As the idea developed over the next several months, Williams received a lot of encouraging feedback and came up with the idea of making the site an interactive one for the user.

“We were trying to figure out what we were going to do with this idea - is he going to talk, walk around, is he going to dance, what do we do with it?” said Williams, who has previous experience illustrating comic books.

“We went through a whole lot of different concepts. It was a neat process, going at it, putting all this development into it without really knowing where we’re going with it.” Williams, who studied graphic design at Western Kentucky University before switching his major to computer programming, said the opportunity for people to share what they create on the site and personalize it has been one of the most attractive aspects of Draw a Stickman.

“The neat thing about it is that it has such a universal appeal,” Williams said. “People who really have no artistic ability can still draw a stickman and everybody draws one uniquely. It’s neat to see so many different people draw it and see their own style they put on it.”

Online response has been significant and the site has taken on a viral quality - about half the online traffic directed toward Draw a Stickman has come from people who have shared the link on Twitter or Facebook, Mills said.

One person who tweeted the link compared the experience to how Pinocchio’s creator must have felt seeing the wooden puppet come to life. Mills said that schools in Australia have expressed interest in adapting the Stickman technology for teaching educational concepts.

Additional developments on the website, including a second Stickman adventure and a gallery of some of the better creations, are in the works as well, Mills said.

On the Net: http://www.drawastickman.com

Article published courtesy of The Bowling Green Daily News