It all started, the story goes, with the simplest of salutations, the word HI on a New York office window written with Post-it notes.
From a few Post-it note replies stuck on to windows across the street — SUP?, MARRY ME?, HELLO FROM THE OTHER SIDE — it’s grown into a global drop-the-mic movement, a sticky-note war that spread to Melbourne, Tokyo, Dublin and now Vancouver’s Gastown.
The folks at Blink, a digital agency on Hastings Street that produces training and marketing videos in live action and motion graphics, decorated their office windows with Super Mario, Yoshi and a Boo made with various colours of sticky notes (they used a felt pen to make black).
Each sticky note acts like a pixel.
“The tricky part was getting the right colours,” Nathan Nutley said.
His colleague Kristina Stoyanova saw tweets about the Canal Street Post-it-note art wars in New York and thought it would be a great idea to challenge other Vancouver agencies to one.
“We follow all the marketing publications and there’s been a lot of buzz about this happening in New York,” Stoyanova said. “We wanted to get in on the game.
“It was spur of the moment, we ran out to get Post-it notes right away.”
3M, the company that makes Post-it notes, has joined the fun, packing kits of differently coloured sticky notes along with a how-to guide called Pixel Art Tips.
In New York, Post-it note art has included superheroes (Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Captain America), games (Angry Birds, Pacman), cartoon characters (Tintin, the Simpsons, Dr. Seuss’s Lorax) and pop-culture icons (Steve Jobs, a Warhol Marilyn Monroe, Prince’s symbol).
But the consensus winner is the Havas ad agency in New York.
Staff there decorated seven floors of their office building on Monday night with a mural of a yellow hand dropping a blue mic under a series of other murals that include Superman’s crest and the Rolling Stones lips-and-tongue logo, all made from sticky notes.
It’s unlikely Blink’s neighbourhoods on the other side of Hastings will take up the challenge, let alone go to such lengths.
“We wanted to get involved in the spirit of it and throw down the gauntlet to other agencies,” Blink’s Yolanda Lougheed said.
“But, directly across from us, there’s an ESL school and a (Church of) Scientology, we’re not expecting a lot from them.”
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