Human Life In Perspective

This campaign has a habit (ba-boom) of generating notable atheists with ironic names. As well as our fantastic top donor Simon Bishop (and fellow donor Joanne Vickers), an atheist called Graham Nunn has also contributed. But as well as being the fifth person to donate, he also, entirely for free and quite uncredited by the press, created every single design element for the campaign, from the now-infamous colourful Atheist Bus Campaign slogan, to the ABC t-shirts available here, to the banner for the site you’re reading now. This campaign hasn’t been about big corporations, media buyers or advertising agencies, but hardworking individuals in unrelated jobs who feel passionately about the cause and have volunteered their time and talents to help us. Graham, we salute you!

As well as producing all our design and holding down a ten-hour day job, Graham also started an (often very funny) project in October called My Creative Year, during which he has pledged to produce one piece of design a day for 365 days. As it’s a big, time-consuming project, he produced this GIF (click to enlarge) as one of the pieces, in order to put his endeavour into proper perspective – and succeeded in creating an amazing visual history of the universe, from the Big Bang all the way through to the (eye-wateringly brief) existence of humans. I think this timeline represents just how short our lives really are, and how we have to make the most of them – because in the great scheme of things, they’re over before you can say, “But I’d just started to find happine -”.

Due to some excellent work by site visitorBase on Mars (the Photoshopping) and his friend Josh (the pic) we have our first high res mockup. Click here for the high res version! Please credit the two of them if you wish to use the picture. More on what we’d like people to submit here.

I’ve been e-mailed these fab mockups by a visitor to the site, D. Mason. Click on either image above to see the full size image.

So, you ask, as we’ve exceeded our fundraising target, where else will the banners appear? The first stage will be to investigate more ads, for longer, on more buses, in more cities (across the UK and maybe beyond) but frankly all of this needs to be decided among the organisers, and we haven’t had a moment to even meet yet… So please bear with us! In the meantime enjoy the designs, and also a new bus mockup sent to us by R. Longuir.

[UPDATE]
I’ve also been sent this excellent bus shelter image (to the right here)  by T. Kaye, released under a Creative Commons License. Click the small image to see the full size one.

(1) Get hold of a decent digital camera, ideally a digital SLR.
(2) Go out on the street and take pictures of some buses*, ideally red bendy buses but others are also fine.
(3) E-mail these pictures to us at photos {at} atheistcampaign(.)org and, if you wish, upload them to Peter Theakston’s Flickr group.

If you’re feeling even keener, then make a mockup of the bus with the banner…
(1) Download this image of the ad banner that will appear on the buses, and use Photoshop or an equivalent (GIMP is free and will do the job) to mockup the bus, putting the ad on the side. You should ideally also blank out the logos of the bus company on the bus.
(2) E-mail the mockup as a JPG or PSD file to photos {at} atheistcampaign(.)org

Please only use our banner in your mockups – this is the design and slogan that was used for the donation page and it cannot be changed now. We’ll credit you if you provide us with good pictures, but as we’re all volunteers in this we can’t pay you for your work.

* – if people think you’re a bus-spotter when you’re taking your photos be ready to tell them you’re doing the work for an atheist campaign!

[UPDATE]
The first new mockup submitted is now shown above, thanks the excellent work of R. Longmuir. Click here to view the high resolution version.

I’ll make sure that anyone that has posted a comment or has e-mailed us about merchandise will be informed when the shop goes live.

There will be a small markup on the cost of each item which will be added to the funds to put ads on more buses.

…transport advertising regulations are more stringent than normal advertising regulations (for billboards, etc) and the decision of whether to run the ad or not is very much at the discretion of the bus companies. It’s their private space, and their criteria for this (I know it’ll make all atheists reading this bang their head against a wall, but here goes) is that the advert “must not offend religious people”.

In their view, the “probably” gets us around this (and even with it, I’m anticipating that the Advertising Standards Authority will receive several dozen complaints from religious people and organisations). Also, as Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, being an absolute “7″ on the faith scale (insisting “there is no God”) doesn’t make sense, as nobody can ever state this as an absolute. The alternative Dawkins proposes is “almost certainly”, but “there’s almost certainly no God” doesn’t make for an overly catchy advertising slogan!

In short our priority is to get these ads out on the buses, to get people thinking about atheism. That’s the major goal. So we hope plenty more people can back our efforts to reach that goal!