A few years ago we were on a west coast road trip and stopped at the Whole Foods in La Jolla, CA for a snack. There were some nice young ladies working a table outside from the Stray Cat Alliance, a California-based non-profit that seeks to raise funds for the sterilization and care of feral cat colonies in California, and the sterilization and care of non-feral strays in shelters until they can be placed with a guardian in a forever-home.
Of course, I was broke at the time.
Of course, I gave them the last $5 I had in my wallet.
Now the SCA is teaming with one of their board members (and friend of Ex-Boyfriend!), Jackson Galaxy. You may remember Jackson from such thrilling things like his awesome show My Cat From Hell on Animal Planet, as well as the many gushing blog posts I write that mention him.
Anyway, Jackson has a new book (you remember books, right?) coming out:
I’m super-excited enough for the book, but by pre-ordering on Amazon via this link, you and I can help the Stray Cat Alliance raise funds for their continued operation. Just pre-order between now and May 10th and forward or scan & email a copy of your receipt to CatDaddyBook@gmail.com, and Tarcher/Penguin publishing will donate $1.00 to help these awesome shelter critters.
Plus, if you’re on Twitter (or just hate reading more than 140 characters at a time), for every picture of your cat you tweet with the hashtag #CatDaddy throughout the month of February, Tarcher will donate an additional $0.05 — seemingly not much, but there’s NO LIMIT on the number of tweets this applies to, so spread the word — make ‘em say “ugh” “MEOW”!
There are a lot of directions I could go in with this post. But I worry about alienating those of you with kids and/or drinking problems (though they usually go hand-in-hand, don’t they?)
And really, the picture says it all, and by “it all”, I mean “babies love getting loaded on chocolate-covered whiskey.”
I’m stuck in jury duty today, so I thought I’d share some awful stuff with you guys — feel my pain!
These are the ten worst commercials I can think of right now that I hope I never see again:
1. Geico’s “Piggy” commercial: Fair warning — Geico shows up a few times on this list. They’ve recently introduced a new ad campaign featuring the fifth “little piggy” that went “wheeeeee” all the way home.
2. Education Connection: Ugh, they’ve made so many of these terrible, terrible ads, each featuring a slight variation of the jingle lip-synched by a slight variation of the brunette for the previous ones. This is the one I hate the most, though.
3. FreeCreditScore.com: I actually don’t hate the newest band they got to do their commercials — they have sort of a harmless OkGo/Fountains of Wayne-on-a-bad-day power-pop thing going on that masks the jingle-ness of the stuff they sing. But the FIRST band they had — those guys sucked.
4. Eastern Motors: Anyone who grew up in the DC-area back in the mid-90s through to today is familiar with these commercials, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one featuring comedian John Witherspoon acting like he’s happy to be doing a local business commercial.
5. Geico’s Caveman commercials: The irony of these is that despite their awfulness, some TV exec thought this was a pervasive-enough meme to warrant an entire sitcom based around cavemen trying to make it in the modern world. Hopefully they have since been fired, or at the very least become better at their job.
6. Burger King’s “sexy” Paris Hilton commercial: My issue with this ad is the conflation of cheeseburgers with sexiness. Das not comput. I’m not a huge fan of Ms. Hilton, but even if this same ad concept were applied to a lady I did find sexy (say, Jennifer Connelly or the red-headed version of Scarlett Johansson), them making out with a Whopper would turn me off pretty damn quickly.
7. Geico’s Gecko in NYC commercial: For the most part, I’ve found the Geico gecko to be the least offensive “pitchman” in the Geico stable of crap. However, two ways to erase any hint of that goodwill indifference is to force the limey voice actor to try and sound like he’s some sort of mutant from the Bronx, and to give yet another pop-cultural BJ to New York City.
8. Verizon LG Spectrum commercial: Let me get this straight — given the option to choose between a phone that will be outmoded in less than six months that does NOT send holographic messages or make repairs to X-Wing fighters mid-flight and a functional R2 unit that DOES, we should opt for the phone because it doesn’t require opening a user’s manual or, y’know, THINKING?
No, David Blaine.
9. Geico’s money with eyes commercial: WTF, Geico? You’re not even trying here, are you?!
10. Miller High Life’s one-second commercial series: This is actually a decent concept from an execution standpoint, and also helped underscore High Life’s brand positioning as a blue-collar beer during the aftermath of the economic crash in late 2008.
That said, it also is advertising Miller High Life. No, David Blaine.
Dis-honorable Mention: KFC’s Cheesy Bacon Bowl, only because I couldn’t find the ad on YouTube. I know this is an un-trendy position to take, but no, “add bacon” does not always mean “made better”. And the way the dude says it, it just sounds like KFC’s not really trying:
“Sir, we really need to get some new product out there — Wendy’s is killing us with that Big ‘n’ Juicy, and the Double-Down was a flop!”
“Eh? Jeez, man, do I need to think of EVERYthing? Just throw some bacon on it!”
This is the teaser for Volkswagen’s Super Bowl commercial. Outside of the the beaver saving the motorist commercial, the best ad from 2011 was easily the “kid Vader” one Volkswagen put out. This might beat it:
I actually had a really cramazing Thirsty Thursday post lined up for today, but it’ll have to wait until next week — I have an exciting announcement to make (well, two actually):
The full video won’t be up on Hulu until next week, but rest assured, it will be embedded ASAP (provided Congress doesn’t destroy the internet between now and then). There’s something vaguely satisfying about Jimmy passing his GED test while wearing one of my tees…
But even MORE exciting than this teeny-tiny step up the ladder of fame is the addition of ART PRINTS to the Ex-Boyfriend product line! While a limited selection to start, I hope to be able to add to the collection of available art prints in the future. Each 11″ x 17″ print is digitally reproduced on 100 lb. glossy cover stock, ships for FREE in sturdy cardboard shipping tubes, and is guaranteed to get you mad high-fives & fist-bumps at your next dinner party (if your dinner parties are typically held at the Jersey Shore. And if they are, the high-fives might be for your delicious rum-ham.)
I realized that while I mentioned this on Twitter and Facebook, I never actually got around to introducing it here on the blog: my new Pterodactyl Springs Summer Camp t-shirt!
What better way to relive the halcyon days of your youth than by throwing on this distressed vintage-looking tee from the Pterodactyl Springs Summer Camp? Guaranteed to evoke fond memories of warm summer nights spent listening to the lake lap against the shore as the flap of dinosaur wings passed by overhead!
In my first industry-related design job out of school, I designed t-shirts for a local commercial screen print shop. Most of the stuff I did was for local small businesses and churches and schools. You know, crappy, unimaginative one-color stuff featuring a lot of clip art, Comic Sans, and Bible verses — and almost always on white tees.
Occasionally though, I’d get a project with multiple colors and more complex designs, which I was then directed by salespeople to quickly replicate or mimic with fewer colors. I’d hear things like “reproduce this EXACTLY…but use two colors instead of four, and we need it to print and ship tomorrow, so I need a mock-up to send for the client’s approval in 30 minutes.” In the Art Room, this became shortened to “you know, use the Photoshop button.”
“The Photoshop button” was the magical, mythical, non-existent cure-all button that non-designers are convinced exists in reality — they just never see it action. As though we artists just hang out by the water cooler with unicorns and yetis discussing sports and politics until we hear salespeople down the hallway and everyone disappears and/or “fakes” working hard to avoid getting handed new projects.
This is only tangentially related to the video below, but any time I hear or see something advertising the wonders of Photoshop, I always pause for a split-second and ask myself, “I wonder if the version they’re using came with a Photoshop button?”
This time of year is when I usually transition from beer & cocktails to wine. It also helps that Meredith & I made sure to stock up our wine rack at Trader Joe’s when we were visiting my family down in Virginia for the holidays. Maryland really needs to start allowing grocery stores to sell booze. Sigh.
Anyway, a very cool design/culture/miscellany blog my friend Adrienne turned me on to called A Cup of Jo recently ran a fantastic (and hilarious) post of wine-drinking (and serving) etiquette tips written by Joanna Goddard and illustrated by artist Gemma Correll. I won’t load the thing wholesale here, but definitely check out the original post here, and check out the whole blog and Gemma’s other work here; it’s great!
A couple weeks ago when I was researching vintage advertising imagery for reference material and inspiration to use for the re-design of my Now Accepting Girlfriend/Boyfriend Applications tees, I found some pretty amazing ads from women’s magazines of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.They weren’t exactly revelatory or surprising — right after we moved to Baltimore a few years ago, Meredith and I hit the kitsch jackpot while hitting up thrift & antique stores for stuff to decorate our house: tons of back issues of True Story magazine. Loaded with full-page ads trying to sell women on using Lysol to both disinfect their kitchen counters and their panty liners, and lots of other classics.
But when I found this over at PlanetOddity.com, it floored me:
There are a few things going on here that are cramazing:
• Directly equating a woman’s happiness with the volume of housework she engages in
• Calling what is essentially speed “vitamins”
• The fact that FREAKING KELLOGG’S, home of Tony the Tiger and Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies and Eggo waffles, and founded by consensus nut-job health-food masochist William Kellogg, was the company manufacturing and selling Pep Vitamins
The thing that’s so entertaining about this sort of advertising is how spectacularly this sort of cultural mindset crashed and burned at the turn of the 1960s and resulted in the dark underbelly of suburban swellness (see Men, Mad and Dolls, Valley of the. Or, if you’d rather laugh than cringe, John Waters’ Mom, Serial).
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