blog post thing-a-maroo

This week's wonderful ad for the children comes from something horrible called Laughing Squid, apparently an art, culture, and technology collective blog for San Francisco. I randomly came across this wonderful little ad, by searching for "squid ads" in google. The first thing that stood out to me is the design for the squid itself. Standing out in neon, the technological squid is perfectly symmetrical, almost emulating something Hindu inspired, with it's all-seeing eye, carefully arranged tentacles in a Vishnu-inspired position, and ending in electrical components and sockets. Right under that the Laughing Squid information can be found keeping the same confines as the squid itself. All the font used matches up very well with technologic squid, even evoking images of neon signs. The background, for the most part, is simply black- efficiently providing a high contrast to the squid image and looking like a very simplified ocean. At the very top rises a Japanese sun, casting it's orange rays over the silhouettes of two ships, some UFO's, and Godzilla. The green and orange both go together very well, seeing as they are analogous colors on the color wheel, and the black provides enough contrast to make most of the text pop. The dark grey text gets a little lost, but that can easily be fixed by lightening it up a few tones. I also feel that the Godzilla, UFO's, and ships are somewhat unnecesary and so small that they are more of a distraction or annoyance. I think that if they were taken out, or made bigger it would improve greatly upon the balance and symmetry of the otherwise wicked piece.