Another Poster for Peace has some really cool poster designs, only one of which I’ve seen previously (“No Blood For Oil”), but where? A design yearbook like Graphis, I think.

I love poster designs in general and when i was doing poster designs for the Boxers, I would often steal wholesale from designs I saw at the Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age exhibition.

This fellow has really set the standard for design “remixes” though. I laugh and laugh at most of this stuff, although sometimes I think the volume of the project overwhelms the cogency – editing would have helped keep his quality high, and one supposes, his powder dry.

I think everyone’s seen this by now, correct? As I recall, the first version I saw lacked the “run like hell” tag, which I think makes it stronger.

I shouldn’t neglect Alfred E. Bush or that Mad Magazine “Clone of the Attack” poster, now should I? Alas, the Mad image apears to not be easily linked (and their site a poster child of bad corporate web presence, blecch!).

I really love this sort of thing, where a design suddenly serves an unintended purpose.

Geez, when did I start making art like this? I must have been 14 or 15. Unfortunately I don’t have any examples from back then.

The idea, I later learned, was generally known as “detournement,” which, in cheese-eating surrender monkeyese, roughly means “turning back on.” The idea was associated with the May 1968 revolts and a both pathetic and influential group of radical intellectuals called the Situationists. They were pathetic because they are the poster children for the left’s tendency to splinter – by the time leader (some say “Pope”) Guy Debord died, he was the only person that he thought had the right to use the label (this assertion is, um, ungrounded, because I haven’t bothered to go research a source).

Not that anyone cared, because the technique had escaped his grasp and was busy producing all kinds of interesting things, including, according to Greil Marcus, punk rock itself.