I saw this the other day over the Santa Monica Freeway. While I appreciated the effort: the folksy yet urgent quality of the handwriting and implied bloodiness of the bright red paint, even in the morning when the light was right you still had to strain to read it from the road, and that made it dangerous. After noon, with the sun behind it, it was entirely unreadable.
On the plus side, it meant that one of my favorite sealed overpasses was accessible again, allowing me to put up this:
And then replace it with this a few days later:
Despite my efforts to bring it into the mainstream, freeway signposting still remains the province of the political fringe - but that doesn't mean it has to look that way. If you're going to do something, do it right: Large signs, readable lettering, black-on-white. That particular overpass has over 150,000 cars pass under it every day - each direction - and an audience of that size deserves respect.
While my modus operandi has always been mass production and serial posting of signs - trying to put as many words in front of as many eyeballs as possible - most people seem to prefer the old school method of simply holding signs on overpasses. Nothing wrong with that, (until the police come and say otherwise,) but if you google "Overpass Protest Signs" you'll see most overpass protests consist of groups of people milling about with a couple of large signs flanked by several smaller signs, giving the overall impression of a spirited, but ultimately disorganized political message. Far better, I say, both politically and aesthetically, to decide on a single message and then hold it across the overpass in letters five feet tall.
With that in mind, I bought a roll of butcher paper five feet tall and 1100 feet long, reinforced my garage door and made an easel out of campaign signs:
So here's the deal: if you'd like to do some large scale overpass protesting, send me a kosmail and let's work it out. I'll want to know the message, font and layout you're looking for, then I'll just paint it, roll it up and mail it to you. No charge. (If you'd like to make a donation, make it to Daily Kos.)
Once you've got the paper banner, duct-tape some bicycle boxes together for backing and you'll have something you and your friends will be proud to stand by. Want to do both sides? No problem, I'll send you two. My "easel" measures 5' by 14', so your sign, or panel, should fit proportionally into a one-by-three-ish rectangle, like so:
Now, signs like these would cost over two hundred dollars from Kinko's or another retail signmaker, and that's on planet-choking vinyl. These are
Free to Kossacks because I've got a big roll of paper, an overhead projector and a
whole bunch of spare time.
Here are some of the other signs I posted over the July 4th holiday: