Picket Signs mini-HOWTO Victor Piterbarg v0.0.1, 28 Jul 2001 This document provides provides a simple introduction to making effective picket signs efficiently. The totality of information presented herein was gathered from the author's very limited experience only and is effectively just a minimal collection of "lessons learned." ______________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. The "basic sign" 3. Materials 4. Putting it all together 5. Further resources 6. Updates/corrections 7. Revision history ______________________________________________________________________ 1. Introduction Seems like lately we've been having a lot of protests, and making signs is an essential part of participating in a protest. Doing this is fairly easy, but it's even easier when you know what you are doing. It's especially good when you know what it is you need to buy, and be able to set a budget before you go shopping. Most of my experience comes from working on the first Dmitry Sklyarov protest in San Jose. I hope this will be helpful to everyone who's making protest signs. It should be noted that we did all our shopping at K-Mart and Home Depot; the "where to buy" information is thus just with regard to those two places -- there're probably better places to buy some of the stuff, but we don't know what they are. ______________________________________________________________________ 2. The "basic sign" A basic sign should posess several qualities: 1. It should be sturdy so it doesn't blow over in the wind or fall apart. 2. It should be double-sided, because people look at you from all sides. 3. It should be easy to hold, because you may end up protesting for several hours, and you wouldn't want your arms to fall off. 4. It should carry a clear, concise, and easily readable message. ______________________________________________________________________ 3. Materials a. Lots of cardboard. Cardboard is a fairly common commodity. However, if you happen to run out, you can purchase card-board boxes at hardware stores, like Home Depot. Discarded cardboard boxes may be found anywhere where people use or sell lots of stuff that comes in cardboard boxes. Use your imagination. b. Lots of posterboard. The posterboard should be about 2' x 3'. You can use any color. White works best, light neon colors work well too. You can use black, and spray-paint it with white enamel. These go for about $.60 a piece, and can be found at pretty much any place that sells art supplies for kids (K-Mart worked for us). c. Markers. FAT BLACK PERMANENT MARKERS. You can never go wrong with those (the fatter the better). However, it never hurts to add some happy colors to your signs as well; a set of 1/4"-thick Crayola markers(?) proved quite useful. Sharpies can also be nice for drawing in fine details, but are less practical for "quick and dirty" signs that need to be readable and quick to make. While colored markers and sharpies can be found in any "art supplies for kids" section, finding sufficiently FAT black markers has proven to be more difficult. Perhaps a specialized "art supplies" store would help? d. Pencils/erasers. Useful for sketching sign layout before you start coloring everything in with markers/stencils. e. Stencils and tape (optional). If you have terrible handwriting, or just want your signs to look really neat, use stencils. If possible, check if the stencil set you're buying is complete; we've somehow ended up with missing letters in ours. Buying multiple sets is advised, since it is easier to use pre-arranged words, and words tend to have repeat letters. Stencils can be found, e.g., at a hardware store. Get some narrow transparent tape (a la 3M's Scotch tape) too, for holding the stencils together. f. Spray-paint (optional). This is particularly useful if you get stencils. Be forewarned that spray-painting text without stencils is difficult and yields rather poor-looking results [in our experience]. Furthermore, even with stencils, spray-painting stencils IS AN ART. Get some practice before doing it for real. A person with prior spray-painting experience proved to be _very_ instrumental in our experience. A large spraypaint can costs around $2 at a hardware store. Spray paint is also useful if you bought a bunch of black posterboard, and have nothing to write with on it. You can either spray paint your message directly, or spray paint the board white, wait for it to dry and then write with regular markers on the dried spray-paint. g. Shipping tape. One roll of fat shipping tape lasts forever, but get two. It's about $3 a roll. h. Staples and staple gun or stapler. You may need to to staple the cardboard and the posterboard to a stick. You will need fairly long staples for this, in the vicinity of 3/4 of an inch. Obviously a staple-gun would be essential. You may also use glue, but it's not as sturdy, and much messier. i. Cutting tools. You will need to cut cardboard. A pocket knife will do just fine. An exacto knife can be useful for some tasks as well (such as making additional stencils). Scissors are useful for cutting tape and other stuff. j. Wooden sticks. The length should be about 4-5 feet. The cross section should be either rectangular or rounded -- the rounded ones are easier on your hands, but harder to attach to the cardboard. The diameter for the round cross-section should be about 1-1.5"; the dimensions of the rectangular cross-section should be about 1"x2.5". You want a good portion of the stick inside the posterboard and still have something to hold on to. Home Depot works well for this; you can cut the right length right in the store. Sticks can be replaced by multiple cardboard strips or cardboard tubes, but we recommend against this. ______________________________________________________________________ 4. Putting it all together. a. Figure out what you want to put on the signs. Make sure your messages are short enough to fit onto signs in VERY LARGE LETTERS. Target length should be 4 words. Anything past 8-10 words is almost guaranteed to be unusable. Remember that each sign can have 2 distinct slogans, one for each side. b. Assuming you came up with a clever message, write it on the poster board. Use a pencil to do a quick sketch of what you want on the poster to make sure you don't run out of space at the end of a line or at the bottom of the text area; definitely do a sketch first if you want to add any non-text "artwork". It is often forgotten that a posterboard has two sides, so if you mess up on one side there's always the other one. Since our target "model" is cardboard sandwiched between two posterboards, one side of each posterboard will be out of sight. c. Take another poster board and write a different message. d. Take a large piece of cardboard, and place one of your posterboards with a message onto the cardboard. Cut around the posterboard until you have a piece of cardboard which is the same size as your posterboard. You may prepare these uniformly sized pieces of cardboard ahead of time. e. Now take one of the posterboards and place it onto the cardboard. Then place both of these over a stick, and run a few staples into the stick from the posterboard side. You can also use glue. Then place the other posterboard on the other side. Staple the posterboard to the stick as well. If you have short staples, you may want to staple the two posterboards to the cardboard as well. Now tape both of the posterboards and the cardboard together along the edges. If you do not have wooden sticks, you can use a double-width (at least) strip of cardboard or a cardboard tube, although this will make the sign less sturdy and more unpleasant to hold. If you use multiple layers of cardboard strips, wrap them with shipping tape for stability and holdability (is that a word?). At this point, you should have constructed a picket sign. If you constructed a turbo jet engine instead, disassemble it, re-read the instructions carefully, and start over from step (b). ______________________________________________________________________ 5. Further Resources The Australian Critics of Scientology group has some useful information about picket signs, which some of this document stems from; it's posted at: http://scn.martinobrien.com/picket/ETHERCAT/GERARD/DEMO/HOWTO/INDEX.HTM#signs At the time of writing, this seems to be the sole useful resource on the subject that Google knows about. ______________________________________________________________________ 6. Updates/Corrections To contribute corrections or additions to this document, email the author at . The author reserves the right to stop maintaining this document at any point in time. ______________________________________________________________________ 7. Revision history 28 Jul 2001 - 0.0.1 - VP - created