The word on the streets
February 10th, 2008This poster:
is appearing all over London.
I wonder who is behind them?
Google says: Your search – DRD/Noid – did not match any documents when we search for “DRD/Noid”.
When we search for “H.M.P. London” the third result is a flickr page showing the posters plastered on a telephone booth near Holland Park.
Fascinating.
It would have been an even better poster if it had some government / bad contract style super small print that you could only see if you went up close to the poster, explaining why ID Cards are such a bad idea.
Still we have to award them an ‘A’ for effort; good job lads.
The great Neil Young says that music cannot change the world. This is essentially correct.
Gestures like this poster are, like music, moving and beautiful, but they will not solve the problem. They will not even convey enough information so that you can make a coherent argument. If you are going to make the effort to print thousands of posters, and then take the risk of flyposting them illegally, then you should make the best of that effort, and remove all ambiguity from the act. That means each poster should explain in detail what the problem is and what needs to be done.
Look at how the state does it:
look at how it is laid out, and the way it clearly and succinctly conveys important information.
If I were to design a poster, it would be a pastiche of the second one, with an appropriate text, so that everyone reading it would have the living daylights frightened out of them. THAT is the kind of poster that would be an effective information tool, of the kind that we need.