Paul, you were unaware of this, but since we are talking about this poster I should share this….

When the advertising for this event was launching we were approached by the Art Director’s Club about helping to promote it. We agreed having not seen this poster. For maybe a day or so we had a little animated gif in our sidebar pointing people to the event. Then Armin posted a link to the poster on SpeakUp. When Bennett and I saw it we decided to pull the ad. We considered posting about it, but decided against it because we didn’t want to give it any more publicity. We came to the conclusion that the only reason the ADC would create something this bad is because they want the shock value and controversy. By talking about it we play into their hands.

Now that we are talking about it, I think the only rational stance any designer can have is to condemn it. The ADC should be rebuked and they should publicly apologize for giving the graphic design community a black eye.

Just wow. Bad art is bad art. This looks like a middle school art project. They should have commissioned Mear-1 on this, he has done a lot of art like this only a million times better.

http://www.mearone.com/images/gallery/armageddon/arma-authority.jpg

I hadn’t seen last years poster, but when I clicked on it…I was aghast.

Is a 15 year old in charge of this art direction?

Actually, it reminds me of a piece by one of my favorite artists… it just isn’t in the same ballpark as far as skill is concerned.

His name is Matt Furie, and this is my desktop at work. Almost of it is done with colored pencils.

http://www.mattfurie.com/wallpaper/furie1024x768.jpg

As for the ADC poster, I have to agree that its excecution sucks.

Armin, With all due respect, I find it funny that designers (or anyone for that matter) think that it is ok to say anything you want as long as it is in “biting jest”. Kind of like saying “with all due respect” and then subsequently bashing the person.

I’m still confused what this has to do with a call for entries. Looks like work from a lazy designer.

Oh yeah. Wrong! (except for maybe the 15,000 entries part)

Since I’m no major stranger to inconsquentiality, I’ll stick with the review of Kox’s painting being bad even by the standards of “bad” folk art-style work. I’ll also pose this as a question: when hired, was Kox made aware of the fact that the ADC or TBWA\Chiat\Day might be treating his work as some tongue-in-cheek joke for the design community to snicker at?

Is it self-parody on Kox’s part or is it national exposure for the sake of a cheap joke?

Poor humor and poor art don’t add up to clever jests, whether it’s the ADC or otherwise, and I’m ready to accept the fact that 15,000 other designers might choose to ignore this sort of trash and pay money to support this year’s competition and whatever joke the ADC makes out of next year’s poster.

I recall the 2006 ADC poster when I was in school and not only did I think it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, but so did my fellow class-mates and professors.

This year, it didn’t so much as get WORSE as much as it got TERRIBLE. I don’t even know what to make of these ADC posters and honestly…I don’t know if they know either.

Someone needs to tell them to stop.

There really is not much to “get”… TBWA came up with the idea of the “Final Call for Entries” and instead of putting some fancy typographic stylings in the back of the poster they put an illustration. An illustration that is about doom. Doom as envisioned by an artist — self-proclaimed “Visionary Artist of the Apocalypse” — whose style is a little raw and themes a little gloomy. They then take current events and trends and satirize them in the poster in stereotypical, crude and obnoxious ways. I much prefer this, to the citrus-ey Call for Entries from AIGA’s California chapters, which I’m sure is much more acceptable to you all.

Plus, the theme of the poster seems quite relevant and appropriate of the times… It’s not gratuitous that some scientists are only giving us five more minutes.

I hadn’t seen last year’s. Actually, I think last year’s is pretty funny. The title gives you a cue and then you see McDonalds turned black and surrounded by all kinds of shiny metal plating. I don’t know if it’s racist. Maybe we’re all getting too sensitive. The show Pimp My Ride is certainly making fun of hip hop culture. Not putting it down, just spoofing it. This poster is just making fun of pop culture television. If you can’t make fun with that then I don’t want to hear Chris Rock mock the way white people talk or act ever again, even if it IS funny and a complete generalization.

HOWEVER, this year’s poster is overtly political, offensive and doesn’t give you any cues to the source of their creativity being sarcasm. And it’s ugly. Granted, that’s a matter of taste, but this is a group for professional Art Directors. Art Directors work with popular culture and marketing. That’s the reality. Art Directors are not fine-art artists. Fine-art can do whatever it wants. It’s completely subjective because the presence of an audience is irrelevant (an idea that has unfortunately made fine-art irrelevant in most people’s eyes). Commercial Art/Graphic Design is different in that it is dependent on communicating with an intended audience. I don’t think this is good communication. Those that say the contrary are forgetting the function of the poster. Personally, this poster makes me feel as though any self respecting Art Director should totally agree with the ideas promoted by this image. Sarcasm isn’t funny unless everyone knows you’re not being serious. If sarcasm fails, then the communication is ineffective.

Now Armin, I just meant that the conversation was not going your way (as in, us getting the joke), and with the pleading tone of your first note you might be disheartened to see that we still don’t get the joke. No offense implied, good sir.

My contention (and it sounds like other people feel similarly) with this isn’t entirely against raw, rough, or cruder rendering in illustration / painting – taste and aesthetic values are definitely the arbiters in terms of preference or deference for the amount of finesse or bluntness in artistic technique. The visual world doesn’t have to be filled with bright boxes of cleanly labelled oranges to please my eyes or pass my aesthetic criteria.

Relevant? – timely? - I won’t argue that the armageddon / end times observations don’t resonate at this point in time. Even with that one-line joke in mind, this doesn’t fully serve that concept without adding a lot of hard-to-swallow bile. Extremism masking as the satire of extremism is still the same spade in question.

The roots of my contention with this poster lie squarely in this thought: if this image had come from any organization other than the ADC I’d suspect larger numbers of the design community would simply write it off as some hack effort by an organization with an axe to grind and no major illustration budget. Coming from the ADC, it draws more attention and poses more thorny questions, but doesn’t manage to polish this piece beyond the point of shinola.

I pitched mine in the trash just yesterday. I get it…the “last” call for entries. Regardless of the concept, it was pure garbage.

Geeeez, it’s a funny poster. gas guzzling hummers, dead birds, priests giving children candy, Wal-Mart, asteroids, foreign rulers riding bombs, anororexic polar bears, obesity, natural disasters, preteen beauty queens, crazy attention loving celebrities and people loving to watch, paparazzi, hurricanes, angry dachshund?, nuclear bombs, people killing in the name of religion, politicians and the devil, death, destruction, folks driving while talking on their bluetooth headsets, i know i didn’t get everything. What’s not to love? It’s the end of the world perhaps, your last chance to enter in other words. Could this have been the poster for the 46th Annual ADC? I guess, It’s a sign of the times? and as far a the illustration goes, i think its perfect, it wouldn’t look right if it were anything else, a realistic style drawing or something. As much as that type makes me puke, it still works. nice gradient, how’d they do that? I stopped trying to “get it” right away, and instead, just enjoy the slight smirk on my face every time I see it. how a person could overlook the posters sarcasm/humor is beyond me. so instead of pitching your poster in the trash, send it to me please. don’t be a art snob, appreciate Mr. Kox’s vision. love, michael

Joke or not, funny or not, the art isn’t that good. If you are entering a contest, you should expect the poster to at least represent the contest standards of ‘best of the best’ or something of that nature. This is just a bad piece of art.

I don’t know how anyone can defend this terrible poster.

It’s not cutting edge. It’s not gritty. It’s not funny. It’s not smart. It doesn’t resonate on any kind of alternate fringe level that mainstream artists aren’t picking up. It’s just plain bad.

I want to like it, no, I really I do, but theres just no way I can will myself to enjoy and appreciate an over glorified piece of teenage art class crap like this poster.

That’s like asking me to appreciate Comic Sans, it just wont happen.

I generally try to explain my opinion regarding an artwork and/or design work.

But this poster just plain sucks.

I did not throw my poster in the garbage, in fact it’s hanging on my wall in our office. Every person that has passed through here has paused and looked at the insane amount of details. Not a single person said, this is crap.

I for one, “get” the joke. It is a way of dealing with all of the issues that many of us don’t know how to deal with.

It says “Final call for entries.” It’s pretty simple to see what the poster was meant to do. I think the poster was successful in it’s message.

i still have this beautiful poster on my wall. glad to hear you all like it!!!