About Obama Posters, Shepard Fairey, and plagiarism

Undoubtedly, many of you have seen the the Obama HOPE poster and the imitations of it, made using the Obamicon.Me web app from PasteMagazine.com, circling around the internet. Maybe some of you have even used this service yourself or have friends who have put their finished image on Facebook. If you haven't yet, don't. Here's why:

Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey is the person responsible for the distribution of the widely recognized HOPE poster. He has receieved much praise, acclaim, and recognition from the poster's sucess. But did you know that the image of Obama found in the poster was not created by, nor does it belong to Fairey? In fact, it is a photograph taken by Mannie Garcia for the Associated Press.Left: Photo by Mannie Garcia, Associated Press
Right: Shepard Fairey's derivitive poster

Although the photographer who took the original photograph of Obama claims not to care about Fairy's derivitive work, he acknowledges that he was never asked permission. Now the AP is filing suit against Fairey.

So what's the big deal? Who cares about those rich money-grubbing bastards at the AP anyway?

I don't. I couldn't care less if they didn't get a dime from Fairey. The point is that he plagiarized the image and is using fair use as a defense. This isn't the first time he has done such a thing. In my opinion, anyone using the obamicon website, which supports Fairey, is (unknowingly) supporting plagiarism.

Yeah, I used it with image of Fairey at the top of this post, but that was to make a point. The image of Fairey was taken from USA Network's website where they award Fairey with the "Character Approved" honor.

See how easy it is to give credit?

Poster Assignment - Music Speaks

Well, I finally finished my poster. It's not exactly a movie poster like it was supposed to be, but I was inspired to do something a little different. This poster is for an event called "Music Speaks: a day of music and art" held annually in Britt Ballroom. Actually, it's not a real event, but it should be. Am I right? Anyway, I tried to follow the same guidelines as I would have when doing a movie poster... flat colors, limited pallet, diagonals, etc. I started with just the guitar. I constructed it entirely out of letters, numbers and symbols. That took a while but when it was finished it wasn't changed again. The rest of the poster went through several revisions. Originally, the "music speaks" was sitting where "a day of music and art" are now. Then it moved and reoriented vertically on the left side and gained the text masked inside until it reached its final resting place. The info went through some, but not much revision...mostly kerning and tracking. The last thing to be added was the speech bubble. That went under the knife just once before I was happy with it. p.s. the web address isn't a real site... at least not right now.

What Font are You?

These days, it seems the internet is full of all kinds of crazy things. One of those crazy things it doesn't have a shortage in is personality quizzes. If you're a MySpace user, you've probably seen your friends proudly displaying which favorite celebrity they are most closely matched to or maybe you even know which super hero you are most like. The possibilities are endless.

If you are interested in design and/or typography, you like to answer questions about yourself, or if you're just plain curious, take the "What Font are You?" quiz.

It turns out, I'm the ubiquitous, reliable sort

Typographic Darth Vader

To go along with the movie poster assignment we received in DMF (which I will hopefully have done soon), type is sometimes taken for granted as merely of means of expressing verbal language. Something I find interesting is when type is successfully used in unexpected ways. Check out this image I found. This is a relatively simple example of what can be done. Do a Google search to see for yourself what crazy stuff people have done with type.
Ingredients:
i
=
T
m
W
k
(
)
#
g
[
]
1
u
v

other characters?

This Is Snowboarding

I had a lot of fun making this collage. At first, I didn't know what I was going to do, but a stack of magazines in my dorm room gave me inspiration. The source images come from my collection of Transworld Snowboarding issues. My idea was to convey snowboarding the way that I see it, both literally and with more subtlety. I used only basic tools in Photoshop, such as the lasso and free transform tool.

Enjoy :)