Friday, 8 November 2013

Day 312



The zombie genre in popular media has moved from strength to strength over the past 50 years and is now dangerously close to reaching levels of overkill, pun most definitely intended. The ghoulish culture will soon be struck dead for good and not from a shot to the head, but from being hit by the bandwagon.

Marketers are evil soulless beings and if they can pin a thin veil of rhetoric upon a product that has no direct correlation with it in order to sell it, they will. This is why we have the facilities to bake zombie shaped cakes, drink drinks chilled by zombie shaped ice cubes and keep our feet warm inside zombie themed slippers.

The issue I take here is that none of these ideas are clever. Bunging the aesthetics of one thing onto an obviously unrelated something else is nothing short of pathetic. The fact is, nobody actually likes zombies. They like the genre; the idea of zombies. They enjoy the films and the live-action role playing and the video games because they each deliver all elements of the genre simultaneously - the combat, the atrocity, the fear. What's to fear about a zombie shaped cake? If anything, I'm the one doing the biting!

I guess what I'm saying is, if you're going to transpose the subtext of idea A onto new environment B, do it with some creativity. Do it with a twist. Do it the way the designer of this GraphicLab Tees product has done it.
For Day 312 of my THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE challenge I am wearing a second T-shirt donation from Rob in California at GraphicLab Tees. It features some marketing design aimed at zombies. It's a bit of light relief that inverts the standard direction of zombie logic; in this situation, human brains are presented as a desirable, fully branded, consumer product, presumably on the shelf of some undead supermarket. Consideration toward the authenticity of the fictional brand has been made by presenting the artwork in a vintage style, giving it a timeless and trusted ideology - a nice touch.
Overall, this is another great addition to my challenge from GraphicLab Tees.

See more from GraphicLab Tees via their Twitter account

THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE Project

Hi, I’m Andi Best and I’m a regular guy, rising to an irregular challenge.

People tell me I have a lot of T-shirts. These people are not wrong, it’s true, I do.

But one person went as far as to tell me I have so many T-shirts, I could probably wear a different one every day. This is obviously not true, but it got me thinking - what if I could wear a different T-shirt every day? What if I never wore the same T-shirt twice for an entire year?

Challenge accepted

I have created project THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE which, beginning January 1st 2013, will track my pro gress sourcing and wearing a different T-shirt every day for the next 365 days – and I’m going to need your help to do it…

TAKE PART HERE