The last time American Atheists came up with a billboard design, I panned it. The message was easily derailed, and they really needed a better, more professional look. Their new design this year is better, and I think the message is sharper.
But Dave Silverman is going to punch me hard next time I see him, because I think it still needs work. It’s a bit garish and the photos make it too fussy and complicated — under normal conditions, a billboard needs simplicity and clarity, since people are zooming past it at 70mph. What will save it is that it’s going up at the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, where hordes of commuters will creep very slowly past it every day, having time to absorb and critique the message.
It’s also going to be in place in December and over Christmas. Bill Donohue will be apoplectic.
You’re getting better, though, Dave! Don’t hit me too hard.
Have to disagree … I think it’s pretty awful :( they should spend some cash on professional advertising people
THAT’S the new design? That’s awful. Not just the design (which looks like it was made in Microsoft Paint), but the message is just awkward.
I’m with Jak, it’s not putting a clear message across, which – correct me if I’m wrong – is what advertising is all about.
This is not good. I don’t care about how un-slick it looks. It’s message(s) are cloudy. And you should pick ONE.
With a casual glance, it could very well be reaffirming the Christian position, claiming that all the things besides Jesus are myths. I could easily see that coming across. In fact, I thought that was the case. It took a while to find get the subtext. And that’s a problem. Do you think this is a subtext? It’s barely a place for TEXT!
I also get that you’re trying to send the message “You’re not alone. There are 37 million of us.” but that doesn’t come across very well. And instead of inviting people to come out of the closet to join our ranks, you seem to be bragging to the faithful. “Hey, there are a lot of us!” Very alienating. Not a way to mend fences.
This sign is one of the reasons I don’t belong to an Atheist group. I hate to be misrepresented, or represented poorly. This really knocks back our cause more than “Whitney” knocks back feminism.
No like.
Y’know what I’d like to see for an AA billboard?
“Happy Holidays from your American atheist neighbors.” With maybe a Christmas tree topped by the AA atomic logo. Simple, easy to understand.
It would blow the fundies’ circuit breakers to have nothing to criticize save the “Happy Holidays” part.
However, I know it’s important to put on a good show on Fox News, so the AA president will go on and make some deliberately provoking comment so they can spend weeks deriding how negative and evil we atheists are.
Sure, I come across as a concern troll. But to me, the most effective atheist billboard I’ve ever seen was the simple “Don’t believe in god(s)? You’re not alone.” campaign. Leave ’em sputtering with nothing to grab onto.
I am not a designer, but with the same message, I would have stripped it down to two photos, Santa and Jesus, gotten rid of the grid layout, and just put the “What myths do you see?” without the orange background. Simplify!
I kind of like the simple 5-word question. It’s non-dogmatic and just asks the viewer to think. Our clear message isn’t an alternative dogma, it’s THINKING.
A Christian will be confused what a statue has to do with myths, “know” that #2 isn’t a myth, be confused what Santa has to do with myths, and a fundie will think #4 isn’t a myth.
And they’ll never see the a mention of “atheist” at the bottom and drive off thinking “What was that about?”
And they need the Easter bunny!!!!
Actually, I think next year’s AA billboard should just read,
HAPPY MONKEY
from American Atheists
You can find David Silverman announcing this on Google+ here https://plus.google.com/u/0/105782365870417634111/posts
Hopefully he will read comments there, so I suggest feedback is given there directly to David too
Jak
Is it too late to stop this thing?
How about simple-to-read text that simply says: “Peace on Earth. Good will to people! (But screw your imaginary friends.)”
I don’t think the message is unclear. But, it could have done with only Jesus and one other myth. Maybe with the same positioning and everything, only with one picture on each side instead of two.
timstotz:
“Peace on Earth” sounds decidedly un-American to me.
The best billboards use humor. Xianity is about as humorless as it is humanely or even mythologically possible to be.
The one I saw on the net was in Florida.
It had a fairy that looked a lot like Tinkerbell, the all time great Disney character. With a magic wand. The message: All Religions are fairy tales.
I’m told the fundies rabidly hated it. That is always a good sign.
PS: I don’t have too many problems with a Xmas themed atheist billboard. You want to be subtly sarcastic so that it takes them a few hours to see the point. Merry Winter Solstice from American Atheists with a tree, reindeer, snowpeople, and even an angel with a treetop stuck up its rear end. Or some such.
The choice in photos was garish and distracting, and the message was unclear. That said, it is better than last year, but not by much. I could have made a dozen better designs myself, and done it for free.
Moggie, no more so than an anti-religious billboard in the first place.
I had an idea for an atheist billboard, but I’m a horrible graphic artist. My limit is stick figures, plants, and fish.
I envisioned a split billboard, where on the left half, it’d have a preacher with hellfire in the background, snarling at a terrified congregation. The right half would have a couple of people having fun (perhaps a family fishing, or just playing a game, or something similar and peaceful).
The caption would just read “Which would you prefer to do on Sundays?”
Are they accepting submissions?
They should……
It’s awful.
There’s a reason that there are professionals in this business: amateurs can almost never do an adequate job.
Who the hell is going to recognize Poseidon/Neptune, especially from an indistinct statue?
Keep “ist” in Christmas, I say.
Glen Davidson
I want a new T-shirt. It will say, “37 Million of us, and that is the best billboard we could make.” I would wager that of the 37 million of us there are a disproportionately high amount of creatives in our ranks. For instance: I’m one.
They’re welcome to hire me. I only have 3 years experience in the business, but I’m confident I could come up with something much better than that. You’re absolutely right, PZ, it’s far too cluttered for a billboard. It needs to be bold and simple. At least they were smart enough to use san-serif fonts, I’ll give ’em that much. :P
Perhaps AA should take a page out of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s playbook. Check out our (I’m a member) billboards, they are snazzy:
http://www.ffrf.org/press/high-resolution-images/
@Tenebras yeah they used a sans serif font, but they mixed italics inline, used poor line spacing, have bad kerning, and poor ratios of font sizes. Apart from that … oh wait, it’s a poor font face too! :)
@Erich all much nicer … I especially love “Reasons Greetings” … now *that* is advertising!
This is just confused and garish overall. It’s like the billboard equivalent of those Timecube web sites. Is the guy in the devil mask really one of the best images they could come up with for this?
Christian billboards generally either hijack some universal good feeling (such as affection for babies in their anti-abortion billboards), or some ingrained primal or cultural fear. Quick, gut-punching stuff on the highway. As much as we find virtue in not being taken by con-men, it’s a more difficult thing to immediately grab people with. That’s why I think the “good without God” style bus ads are better than these billboards. Heck, even the “Imagine No Religion” sign with the WTC towers standing is a better billboard than these clutters.
Overall I think there message is getting lost and they should stay 300 miles away from Santa. Telling random kids as they drive during the holiday season that Santa isn’t true is playing the role of Grinch.
While some may disagree I think the bill boards focus should be focusing more on the great things the lack of religion has done.
“Good without God”
Or the twin towers billboard was very profound.
Yep, pretty awful. In one rather ugly format they:
1) Send an unclear message;
2) Use unclear imagery, with some overlap;
3) Seem to be saying nyeah-nyeah;
4) Aren’t the least bit witty;
5) Engage in rather overt Christian-bashing, which isn’t really the point;
6) Fail to show what atheism offers other than rejecting Christian symbols;
7) Take on Santa Claus, whom we all believe in.
Simpler, wittier, less confrontational, showing an upside to atheism (or maybe something showing how perfectly reasonable atheists are despised while complete idiot Christians or Muslims or Jews are adored…I mean really, whose finger do we want on “The Button”?). It’s really a two-foot putt, and it’s depressing that this bit of poorly conceived and poorly executed dreck wasthe best they could do.
The Florida version is better, but they’re both still too garish to read what they say. Why the halloween colors for a Christmas promotion?
That is a brilliant billboard.
Well done to whomever made it!
The story this billboard will generate is: “Atheist try to ruin Christmas again, this time by telling children Santa is a myth.”
I mean, I know any ad will be condemned, so maybe that’s not worth worrying about. The fact that it’s butt-ugly, though, is.
Why don’t they open a paypal donation jar and we all contribute a few bucks to hire a marketing professional to help with the billboard design?
Plus there’s the whole Santa problem – like we need to deal with that. “Mommy, why does that sign say Santa’s a myth?” Thanks a lot, killjoy atheists. (or “Why is Santa next to the devil?”)
Ah, screechy monkey, same thought same time.
Oh, man, Dave Silverman is going to hate me.
Yep, needs to be a cleaner design. I’ve spent a bunch of years in the Ad industry and the best ones are always the simplest and least cluttered.
LOL, people here are dumb as a brick. Please don’t listen to stupid atheists and islamic apologists on Pharyngula.
The wording and sign is brilliant, best atheist sign yet.
Do they test these signs out at all, even just to the extent of putting a few versions on their own site and asking people for feedback?
How about:
You aren’t alone at Christmas, 37 million other Americans know it is a fairy tale too
That still makes the focus Santa Claus, not god/religion, though.
Syggyx, fuck off.
That billboard is so not going to work. It’s cluttered, it’s unclear, and it’s ugly. We said last year that Silverman needs to employ some pros, I see that worked well. *eyeroll*
PZ, from what I’ve seen here, this is a criticism of the media not the man for the most part. I hope Dave doesn’t get too offended. I feel I was a bit, ahem, strident, in some of my comments, but I really don’t mean overt offense.
http://www.wftv.com/news/news/business-owners-customers-upset-over-controversial/nFCCc/
The link goes to the Florida billboard, All religions are fairy tales.
It didn’t last too long. People complained and it was taken down.
The fairy needs a little more work. It doesn’t look enough like Tinkerbell after all. It should have wings among other things.
Really. American Atheists and David Silverman deserve moutains of credit for actually doing something besides being a keyboard slacktavist.
AA and DS should crowdsource the next billboard. Not only are there 37 million atheists (probably more, the No Religions run around 66 million) but many are talented and motivated.
Whenever I see PZ speaking in red text, I imagine him speaking with the voice of Genesis from Preacher.
Well…they’re doing a little bit more than sitting in front of a keyboard. Ya gotta give’em that! Don’t cha?
I see wings.
If it looked like tinkerbell, Dizneycorp would have sued.
Hey!!! You are right. The picture is small on my screen and they didn’t show up so well.
I still think the fairy needs more work.
And I know all about Disney and their lawyers. The trick is to make it clearly not Tinkerbell but at least as appealing. Tinkerbell is one of my favorite Disney characters.
At #44
Good point. Very insightful and clear.
That billboard design is terrifyingly bad. Seriously, someone hire a professional graphic designer. Or if they did, get a better one.
A minimalist billboard is a good billboard. The above image looks like it should be a web banner or something, that turns my cursor into a crosshair so I can ‘shoot’ at the myths or whatever.
This is harsh, but I think fair. The appearance of competence is immensely important in any kind of mainstream media war.
American Atheists – please listen to us. We’re your friends and some of us are your donors. We love you and want you to succeed. We’re not critics who’d talk down anything you did just because it was you.
Your signs are awful. They look foolish, and they make you look foolish. They’re graphically ugly. They’re confused. And yeah, it was really, really, really, really, really dumb to put Santa up there (see comments above by Carlie and screechy).
You’re a fabulous organization, but in this area you have a problem that keeps repeating itself. Someone—whoever it is—who is signing off on this stuff needs to have their ego deflated and redirected to a project on which they can make better contributions. No, I don’t have any suggestions. I’m not a professional, and you should be hiring and listening to one.
I don’t understand the orchestration that goes along with putting up the billboards. The Fox News confrontations are preplanned? It seems like we purposely want them to get a ratings boost on AA’s dime. If having to defend the billboards, why not do it on a neutral or left leaning network? Anyone watching Faux is not going to be swayed to use reason. It just feeds their hatred.
I agree with everyone else: This is a terribly designed billboard. It’s ugly, it has too many words and pictures, and the words and pictures do not make sense.
I don’t like it much, and not on any aesthetic basis. I don’t like it because ‘myth’ is a very murky concept – a myth need not be totally incorrect – I don’t like it because myths can easily accumulate around a real person. All kinds of myths sprang up about the Elizabethan mystic John Dee, but I do not conclude from these that Dee has never existed, just that he had no magical powers.
The chap on the immediate right of the slogan is one Santa Claus, aka St. Nicholas, aka Nikolaos of Myra, who was very probably a real person. If he didn’t exist, some other chap’s bones were stolen, carried off to Italy, and are currently occupying a crypt in his name, and it would in principle be possible to tell whether these were of the right vintage, and came from the right part of Greece, and were the bones of a man who had eaten the sort of diet associated with strict Christians of that era – not conclusive, but suggestive. It’s not unlikely that Jesus had a historical basis. He would not have been the first or the last Messianic candidate, nor the one with the greatest impact in his own lifetime.
If even I, as an atheist, can only identify Poseidon and the Devil as totally fictitious (leaving aside the murky ‘mythical’), who knows what anyone religious – and in the context of the poster, this means ‘Christian’ – will make of this? Probably that atheists know zilch about Nikolaos of Myra.
LOL!
Like I said, dumb as bricks…
Josh:
Actually, I think they could take a cue from PZ here. Remember when he opened up the ‘I need a new banner’ at sciblogs? A lot of atheists are professional artists, a lot of them have experience in media, etc. I think they could open up a Billboard Ideas Wanted some months before planning the new billboard and they might be very surprised at the excellent work and ideas that would come flooding in.
The orange on black background doesnt really work for me. it gives a Halloween vibe. The pictures could be of much better quality
Reading my mind here.
1. Set up a Request for Submissions.
2. Set up a contest where people vote for which ones they like.
3. Simultaneously have a donation jar. I would kick in a few bucks for Xmas.
They could make it fun and build a lot of interest. And get it to pay for itself.
PZ did that with his Design a Banner request and just about all of them were good IMO. One of them is the banner here at FTB.
Sigh. This is just screams amateur design. It looks cheesy, cheap, and well, a million other bad things. I really hope they listen to what others are saying, this near universal condemnation should be worrying.
I work in the communications dept of a hospital once and a while and get to see the graphic designs the scientists and doctors often come up with for their posters and websites. This reminds me a lot of it. Well intentioned design but in a serious need of help. The dept spends a lot of time redesigning things to make them clear. Sometimes I think all software for creating designs should be available though permission only.
At least they did not use Comic Sans.
Ick, that looks like it would be right in place next to those “Human-dog hybrid, is this image real or fake?” ads. I agree with the purpose entirely, and I like that there are some pro-atheist billboards put up (especially because there are way too many Christian ones here) but the execution is just really poor. The message could be a little less petty-sounding, because as much as the Christians deserve it, Atheism doesn’t benefit from sounding like a Santa-hating evil organization. and the overall design is just… gaudy.
I’m going to agree with a few other people in that they should really go with an open call to anyone who thinks they can create a good billboard. Everyone could vote on the submissions and then we’d have a nice billboard that wasn’t cringe-worthy.
Oh, and those FFRF billboards really are nice. Good design, simplistic, and “Beware of Dogma” made me laugh.
+loads for the folks who suggest crowdsourcing. FFS, that even happens (to a degree) in ad agencies… No-one’s questioning the intention, but they need to look at their creative process. Even if you do it internally, get a good creative brief together before starting or you won’t get anywhere. Once you do, hit the world with it!
Gee, I liked it.
A lot of people don’t even consider the possibility that the religion they believe in is mythological, just like the Greek gods and Santa Claus.
Though most people probably won’t recognize Poseidon. Yeah, graphically it could be better.
Requires too much thought, which is not what the target audience is known for.
Wouldn’t it be smart to do something like have a design contest on Deviantart.com with a $1000 prize for the winner, or something? There are a hell of a lot of kids who are really really talented and, besides, it’d basically be a free billboard to hold a contest in some art community with millions of users.
There are too many competing places to look – I start at the middle, dart up to the top, then notice the text on the bottom across, and never really even get to the pictures… I shudder to even think about how to try and “get” that on a billboard. A billboard has to be something simple and direct that can be glanced at in less than a second and held in temporary memory long enough to figure out what it said. This is… the opposite of that.
If they want to go with the “37 million Americans know myths when they see them” line, they shouldn’t use any other words (besides their site URL). If they got someone to draw up minimalist illustrations in all the same style and let the pictures do most of the work, even four panels wouldn’t necessarily be too much. For instance, have Thoth in one panel, Kali in the second, Zeus in the third and Jesus in the fourth. Even if people don’t know exactly what gods the rest are, they should still easily recognize them as something they consider mythical.
Since so many people submitted banners for Pharyngula, maybe we should get to work on some designs for the American Atheist billboard for next year. Make a fun little competition out of it.
I commented at Dave’s Google+:
How about this:
*pic of jesus* WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? *pic of Santa*
black background with green lettering.
Makes the point, not quite as confrontational and let’s parents still have fun messing with their kids using santa.
Of course the downside is parents might start believing santa is real.
another quetion I have is do we want to make our case on the billboard or would we rather do that at the convention/website?
Maybe a more open ended question that doesn’t come with an implicit answer like “what is a myth?” or “why do we believe?”
and then they go to the website to find out.
It sounds sneaky but if the intention is to get our point of view heard it can’t be accomplished by the billboard alone.
Implying that Jesus is a myth at the outset will shut their ears before we even get to talk.
Unless, of course, you trying to attract atheists but I figure that there are alot of passive voiced agnostics out there that a softer approach could draw.
Billboards try to sell things. They’re not the product.
Though it is pretty ugly, I don’t think the message is that unclear.
I’d love to put something like this up on campus. My group needs to grow, and controversy will get us more attention on campus (our problem isn’t that we don’t have enough atheists on campus, it’s that they don’t know our group exists).
As pointed out above, Jesus might have existed, so it’s not ideal, and quite possibly wrong, to call this a myth.
But while there have been plenty of historical figures who have claimed the existence of this god or that, it is those gods that nobody has ever seen, so as far as I’m concerned, those non-existent supernatural beings that are claimed by the religious to exist are the ones we should be going after, and the ones we should be addressing on our billboards.
It looks like a shitty online ad to be honest.
Dear Dave Sliverman,
Please do not thump PZ. Please do read this note instead.
http://writerunderground.com/2007/11/07/how-to-write-a-billboard-or-copywriting-at-70-mph/
Thank you.
I LOL’d.
Prior to reading PZ Meyers response @6 my thoughts were to display the Santa and Christ figures on the right and preface them with the simple “Spot the Myth”.
As a challenge it encourages people to look at it and I’d love to see religious parents try to explain it to their kids.
Ugh. Looks like non-designers making design decisions. Someone needs get their ego out of the way.
I see only three myths there! Clearly you don’t understand divinity, your just ignorant and need to repent. Stop this nonsense now
of course Poseidon is real…
Look, next year have a contest on Pharyngula and it will get done properly, and brilliantly.
Maybe throw in a competition for webdev. That site sucks!
Yay, new topic for Colbert and Stewart!
When we have a spot the myth type rhetoric, we all will infer that they are all similar. When people of faith see that kind of rhetoric, I think it’s easy for them to infer that the things besides what they hold dear are myths. If you’re going to go down that road, maybe a red stamp with the word “Myth” placed on each graphic. You’re begging the question that people will come to the same conclusion based on their life experiences. Not a good way to change minds.
And shouldn’t the text be: What mythic figures do you see?
I don’t like the garish colors, but agree that it will give Donohue fits.
Who the hell is designing these and why haven’t they been politely thanked and asked to step aside?
I wonder how many folks would recognize Poseidon/Neptune these days. I see Dubbyah Bush on the right forgot his makeup that day.
And the “since 1963” part is entirely superfluous. It’s not old enough to give it any sense of age-related gravitas, and not young enough to be saying “Hey, we’re new, look at us!” It adds nothing to the message.
As much as it pains me to say so, I’m in agreement with the majority consensus here.
I didn’t like last year’s billboard, either. Both seem to have been designed by the same person/committee.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
No kidding, crowdsource this and you’ll have a MUCH better outcome.
For those of you who would juxtapose just the Christan symbols of Jesus and Santa, there are fundamentalists — Jehovah’s Witnesses and others — who would LOVE for you to make their case for them. They see Santa as myth and Jesus as real. Spot the myth? Easy! It’s Santa. Jesus is the “real” one. Doesn’t work conceptually. Unless you’re going for deep irony.
Frankly, I think the whole “myth” symbol thing is a loser. I’m also a bit concerned that the Santa in the poster might have been cribbed from an advertisement. Did you get rights for that photo? Getting sued by Coke (or whomever) for unauthorized use of “their” Santa would not be a very nice way to spend the winter solstice. Just sayin’.
I have no idea why some companies/organisations thinks they can get away with random staff doing the design work instead of employing actual designers. You wouldn’t get a designer to do a scientists job, or an accountant to renovate a bathroom. So why do people think that any ol’ person will do when it comes to advertising?
Let’s get submissions going right now.
Is AA really that bereft of creative people? However, even if that was true, how hard would it have been to run this past a few people first, preferably ones outside the oeganisation. It needn’t even have been that many eithe for them to see that it was a failure After all, as far as I can see, the only one on here saying they like it is one of the resident maroons.
@Kevin 87: Except any fundamentalist is just going to point to Santa and state “That’s the myth”. Except they’re not the target market – they’re not going to change their minds.
The target market is the ‘soft’ religionists those who keep the Santa myth for their kids who will need to explain this to them if they see the ad. The target market is the non-religionists who will get the joke and may decide to join.
Consider also that it would be an atheist advert that the religious wouldn’t be able to complain about :-)
Anyone else see David’s latest post on his google+ page “I’d love to address those who think this is a bad billboard, but I am too busy dealing with all the press interviews and those who want to have one in their neighborhood. But I’m sure we’d get this kind of ALL POSITIVE press if I’d put up a different board. Armchair quarterbacks usually know just what they are talking about.”
The man is an ass. Fuck him and AA.
Kaylakaze:
I saw that. My money definitely not going there anytime soon. I was very disappointed by that dismissive reaction.
Damn I hate typing on my phone.
Which ones are myth? Neptune and Santa Claus. Satan blinds the minds of unbelievers so they can’t see the truth. He came to steal, kill, and destroy. Jesus, the Son of God, came to bring life by dying for our sins, being buried, rising from the dead on the third day according to the Scriptures, and then ascending into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. I want to thank the American Atheists for making Jesus the topic of discussion this holiday season. The Apostel Paul said, “But what does it matter? The important thing is that, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.” And Jesus said, “If I be lifted up, I will draw all men to myself.” Thanks for putting Him up on your billboard. http://atheistlegitimacy.blogspot.com/