I was frustrated with myself and the world one day, and went to sit in Hoxton Square to do the Guardian crossword. Flicking through the G2 section, I came across a short article about the “Keep Calm and Carry On” phenomenon — the WW2 poster that had been rediscovered at a second-hand bookshop in Alnwick in 2000 and, fuelled by the financial crisis and a wave of nostalgia, had become inescapable on mugs and tea towels across Britain.
It occurred to me that this was exactly the wrong sentiment for this age — and that the stoicism it recommended was being viewed ironically by most of the people who’d bought it. The various messes that we were in weren’t going to go away if we carried on, keeping calm. We had to invent our way out of them.
I started sketching on the newspaper itself. Stiff upper lip was replaced by a stiff upper arm from soldering. The Tudor Crown — symbol of the state — was replaced by a crown made of spanners. And “Get Excited and Make Things” was born. I posted it to Flickr that same day.
Picked up in a day
By the end of the same day — 18 March 2009 — the poster had been picked up by Boing Boing (Cory Doctorow called it “a fitting remix of the classic, Blitz-era posters for the current econopocalypse”), Make: Magazine (“This is more our cup of tea. I love the crescent wrench crown”), and 43 Folders, where Merlin Mann wrote simply: “This, my friends, is the thing.”
Within days a Flickr pool was collecting sightings of the poster on studio walls and workshop bulletin boards around the world. The original image eventually passed 90,000 views.
Everything for charity
Every commercial version of the poster directed its proceeds to a good cause. Howies, the Welsh ethical clothing brand, made it their t-shirt of the week — it became their fastest-selling shirt ever, with proceeds going to the Do Lectures. Jen Bekman’s 20x200 produced a limited-edition art print for Creative Commons. Mike Monteiro sold prints through Mule Design for Smallcanbebig.org. I put the source files up under a Creative Commons licence, so anyone could print their own.
Beyond the design community
The New York Times Magazine featured it in Rob Walker’s piece on the Keep Calm phenomenon. I was named to Ad Age’s Creativity 50 in 2010, partly on its strength.
The biggest later push came from Wil Wheaton, who took “Get Excited and Make Things” as a personal catchphrase. Through his blog, PAX keynotes and other appearances he carried it well past the design and maker crowd into geek culture at large. He wasn’t that interested in the poster; he’d adopted the idea. As he put it: “There is no reason that a person should not get excited and make a thing and share it and find other people who love the same things.”
James May wore the Howies t-shirt on BBC’s Man Lab. Ubuntu used the phrase to rally their wallpaper submissions. David Benque at the RCA told me some of his fellow students thought I’d designed the original “Keep Calm and Carry On” as well.
Wikipedia lists it as one of the notable “Keep Calm” parodies. It came before the Keep Calm-o-matic generator that turned the format into a fill-in-the-blank meme. Most of those were jokes; this one I actually meant, which is maybe why it’s stuck around.
Five words and a spanner crown
It arrived just as the maker movement was picking up speed and a lot of the old knowledge-economy certainties were falling over. It said in five words the thing I kept trying to say at BERG: you make your way out of a mess, you don’t manage your way out. A spanner crown instead of a royal one.
As I put it at the time… please stay excited, please stay making.