Starting sometime in January of this year, I got moved into an office with a window. Just for giggles, I stuck up suction cups and posted my first Friday Sign.
It was a big hit, and I produced a new Friday Sign every week after that, until my last day at the job.
This archive will list and display all editions of my Friday Signs, along with larger version (600px wide) PNG files and printable PDF files.
Just click on the thumbnail to get the 600px PNG version!
When I found out that my co-office-workmate guy was a "old skool" gaming fan as well as myself, I got the idea of making this sign; what epitomizes Friday better than Luigi leaping upon the final flag of world 1-1?
The choise of Luigi was simple; Luigi is my favorite Mario Brother.
The most interesting thing, though... was how many people "got" the sign! Even the non-gamers in the crowd got the gist... thus the Friday Sign was born.
Naturally, the next Friday sign had to be from the Zelda franchise... but I couldn't come up with any ideas. I had 'real' projects to work on anyway, so I found my favorite image from the Four Swords manual and made this sign.
Needless to say, this sign didn't garder as much attention as my last one, but many people found the Link getting smacked with the Fire Rod to be funny...
That was my favorite part too!
Soon after, I found myself strugging with a stack of undocumented code, and I KEPT GETTING BOTHERED! I wanted to make a point, so I took a brain break and made this sign.
I picked a picture of the meanest bugs I knew of (Starship Troopers) to make a point.
I then turned off the light in my office and attempted to get work done. Needless to say...
It didn't work.
Friday rolled around again, and it was time to make a new sign... and I didn't have one!
The first FIVE PEOPLE by my office mentioned it. Without knowing it, I had created a phenomenon.
And the fans demanded more!
Deciding to keep with the "Video Game" theme, I dug back in the Retro Memory vault and pulled out Super Mario Kart! Hence the sign was born.
I had more undocumented source code to modify, and we had big projects queued up in the Print Department (which I helped out in)... it was going to be a long week.
Pulling off the success of my first Friday sign, I launched "It's Monday."
Again, the humor was universal... everyone loved it. It's quite easy to feel for Mario here...
...and still think his week might go better than yours!
The point was not coming accross. Bugfixes would not come with interruptions happening! I decided to try the tounge in cheek route again and produced a sign.
This time (following the trend of non-Friday signs), we were using the movie Wargames.
Who would have thought there were so many national emergencies in one day?
This sign resided on the window all week, until Friday that is...
If you've ever worked in a high-pressure production environment, you'll understand the frustration of working with flakey equipment.
We printed Large Format images on a Roland VersaCAMM printer... a printer of legend.
The legend was that whenever a project was due... the printer could be counted on to fail. Or dump ink. Or streak, scratch, fold, spindle, and mutilate whatever we were trying to print.
With this Friday Sign, we took out a bit of frustration upon the stupid machine.
Speaking of which... the "Ike" referred to was my Old-Skool Gamer coworker. "Stacy" was the guy who worked his tail off in the Screenprinting department, and was the building general handyman. Us three and Roland made the production department.
Up to now, I had been very Nintendo-centric. I wanted to broaden my appeal, so I brought in Sonic the Hedgehog!
The image is the "Final Image" from Sonic the Hedgehog, along with the Sonic Font... that I found somewhere on the internet...
But I couldn't leave without a small commentary on the Sonic/Mario controversy, now could I? Of course not! So I brought back my friend Luigi to comment on Sonic's 16 bit glory.
Right about now, I had just purchased my first few Virtual Console games for the Wii, and my favorite from the lot had to be Kirby's Adventure.
So when Friday rolled around... naturally it was on my mind!
This sign didn't get quite the reception from the other signs. Is it simply because Kirby isn't as well known as Sonic and Mario? Or was it the humor depending on a horrible pun based off the name of the final boss? The world may never know.
It's Roland Bashing Time, again!
I wanted to step a bit away from Console games for a bit; after a bit of a brainstorm, I remimbered a PC game I used to play named Star Trek: Judgement Rights. Could this be Friday Signed?
I found the scene in Panel 3 on a random Internet site... and after a quick session in Paint.Net, I had me a Roland spreading distruction over an innocent Starbase... and Redshirt.
This one recieved chuckles all around, and much general commendation. Along with a woried question about where I found time to do these.
Well... I got all my projects done early and had a bit of time to burn whilst uploading files, changing rolls of paper... and most relevant: I had to babysit the Roland. I couldn't program and keep an eye on the stupid machine at the same time, but I could do some point-and-click humor art and still reach the machine in time to stop it if it tired to eat the project!
I also got a bit of a... not quite a blessing, per se... but more of a "Keep the projects coming and we can keep appreciating these funny signs" from upper management! NICE! Hence the complexity of projects went a bit higher, as I didn't have to cram everything into off hours. I could spend "dead time" on these as well!
Brandon, our shipping and receiving clerk bragged about how he was going up to New York to visit friends/family over the weekend, and was getting Friday off.
I mentioned that that would mean that he'd miss Friday's Friday sign! He said that it was too bad, but although that was compelling, the tickes were booked and he couldn't reschedule.
So I made Brandon a special Friday sign, so he wouldn't feel left out. I also decided to use this sign as a vehicle to vent on the volume of MICROSOFT WORD "ART" our Art Department had been recieving for shirts and banners! They were HORRIBLE! And we'd get them, and have to COMPLETELY REDRAW THEM to be able to make separations, etc.
The general reception: hillarity. I was suprised.
Thursday's vent on Word Art was refreshing... but it was retrogaming time again! This time with Megaman, Rush, Roll, and Dr. Light. Wiley and a few of his robots come in as well.
I had been a bit stumped, trying to think of a new game to use; I nearly kicked myself when I remimbered Megaman. How could I forget MEGAMAN?!?
I really liked how this one turned out. It's had been hard finding a Roll sprite. But all in all, I got good response from the gamers on this one.
Ticket Sales for Broadway's "Monty Pyton and the Holy Grail" opened up Friday Morning of this sign's premiere, and the guys on the radio were having a field day. You could get free tickets if you went to the box office, talked to Randy from KLUV, told him you were a listener... and provided him a shrubbery, of course.
I really don't know where this sign's idea came from! It just sprug, fully formed, into my mind when I walked into the front door!
This one turned out GREAT, IMHO. Not only did I pay homage to Monty Python, I got to make fun of Green Day with not one, but THREE jokes at their expense! The general reception was confusion... I guess not EVERYBODY likes Monty Python.
I realized much to my chagrin that I had completely ignored Pokemon! How could I have done so? Inconcievable! To make up the loss, I tried to come up with something funny. When I saw the name 'Slaking,' the whole joke fell right into place.
The name ASHley comes from my FireRed cartridge. I and my friends bought FireRed and LeafGreen a couple of months ago. I booted it up, and was faced with a connundrum. Boy or Girl? Well, I had already played the game through as Ash, so I picked Girl. Then what? I needed a name. Not just any name would do... ASHley! Quite the pun, my friend. I couldn't decide which was worse for trainers battling me. Venusaur's Razor Leaf, or my character's name?
Back by Popular Request: The heroes from Friday Fantasy. The PUNishment is just a bit too severe for our friend Roland...
Much appreciation from the first panel by all passerby (my office was right between the Water Cooler and the Loading Dock, the two places most conducive to slaking), and much laughter at the KOed Roland.
I couldn't decide on a video game for the next sign, and I was running out of time. So I picked a CONSOLE instead.
Well, that just wasn't funny enough all alone, so I built a joke around it.
Then I tossed in the "All I Got" sign, just in case nobody got the first one. Apparently kilts, bagpipes, Virtual Boys, and cheese are quite funny, even to the laity! Who woulda thunked?
I had just filled up my gas tank, and being a 100 mile commuter, I was not in a cheery mood. On the way to work that morning, I heard on the radio about a study made about the new Daylight Savings Time, and how it had had a negative effect on pollution rates. (I.E., they went up.)
"Typical," I thought. But then I thought more.
Now, I believe Global Warming exists. However, I'm not convinced that it's going to spell the end of life-as-we-know-it, and expecially not in the timeframe that some crazy doomsday evangilists (*cough*Gore*cough*) would have us believe. I'm not entirely convinced that Global Warming is even humankind's fault (one good sized Volcano beats us any century. Are we responsible for volcanos, too?). I simply do not believe that Humans have the power to alter the environment to the level proclaimed, either good or bad.
I do believe that we should take a step back, take a deep breath, and take a good hard LOOK. I want to know how Global Warming WORKS before I start poking around with a stick trying to fix things. Stop putting ethanol in my gas to "save the air"* and stop trying to make me feel bad about Global Warming. I refuse to feel bad about something I may not have any control over in any case!
Moral of the story: STOP TINKERING WITH MY LIFE just because you THINK it MIGHT be the right thing to do. NOBODY UNDERSTNDS GLOBAL WARMING YET. Yes, try to reduce emissions. But not at the cost of making short-sighted wide-sweeping decisions. Check your matype="text/css"th!
* By the way... an new study says that ethanol in gas makes WORSE pollution than gas without. *GASP!* Who would have thought? How about EVERYONE WHO DIDN'T WANT INEFFICIENT ADDITIVES IN OUR GAS?
Perhaps it's all the tinfoil-hat environmentalists getting to me... I had the end of the world on my mind.
I remimbered the old Legend of Zelda cartridge. At the end of the item list, there was an image of Link standing there, holding a sign saything something like "Read the manual for more information." I thought it would be funny to have Link make like the sandwich-board wearing preachers of doom.
What better place to proclaim the end of the world... than Koopa's Castle? I think Luigi thinks the same way.
But you've come to know my Friday Sign sense of humor; I love wordplay. I love Bill Nye, as well. The End Of The World Is Nye, perhaps? Naturally, I had to do it.
I had turned in my two weeks two weeks ago, and it was Friday Sign time again. Various places around the Internet recommending sending out an email saying goodbye to the company, telling them how to contact you, etc.
It's Friday! I can do better than that!!
I decided to bring back the "cast" from all of the Friday Signs I had created up to this date (the video game cast, that is.). Trying to find a suitable backdrop, I discovered this screenshot of the overworld map from Super Mario World. EXCELLENT! I sprinkled the stars all over the page, in general poses of "Goodbye," and posted it, along with a sign with my contact information.
Ike had told me that I should repost all my previous Friday Signs; they had been such a hit in the past. I decided it would be good to just set up a website with all my Friday Signs on it. Here's the site, and there's the sign I used to advertise!
I used resources from all over the internet in making these signs. I believe these resources to be Public Domain. If I'm wrong, please contact me about it, so I can place credit where it is due (or take the offending sign down). It's not (and never was) my intent to infringe copyrights. The intent was humor, pure and simple.
Sprites that appear in these signs come from The Spriter's Resource, except the Roll sprite from Megaman 9 to 5, which came from Sprites Inc. The sprites are copyright their respective owners, such as Nintendo, Capcom, Sega. I believe that these works fall under the heading of "parody" in most cases, and in all cases are transformative enough. If the copyright owners feel that this is incorrect, please contact me immediately so I can remedy the situation.
Fonts used include Helvetica, Eurostile, PC Senior, Roadgeek, NiseSonic, Return of Gannon, and the FireRed/LeafGreen Pokemon font from the Pokemon Script Collection. Oh, and Arial and Times New Roman (bleck). Why PC Senior instead of Press Start? Who knows?
Various other images were simply found on the Internet with Google Image Search. Again, I'm pretty sure they are public domain... at lest the ones I used. Oh, and I got some photographs from The Morguefile (excellent free image source).
All planning and punning and jokes are copyright me. You can contact me at autodmc AT_SIGN autodmclabs DOT_SIGN com.
