84. ROSE/GLENN GROUP
Art director Stan Byers from Rose/Glenn Group in Reno, Nev., was willing to be jailed for design. “I guess I’m a little perverse,” he says. “It was exciting for the graffiti artist in me, yet fulfilling for my inner Eagle Scout.” His project, Signs, is a wild (read: illegal) posting of fake street signs that convey inspirational messages for the northern Nevada community organization We Love This Place. While the project was originally executed illegally, it has since been embraced by the local government.

Byers and his crew found it challenging not to get caught while putting the signs up. “I knew as long as we got them up that they’d look so real, most people would assume they were legal,” he says. “I was kind of hoping to get arrested while installing them—can you imagine someone being jailed for putting up a sign that says, ‘Say Please and Thank You’ or ‘Call Your Mom Out of the Blue?’”

The Rose/Glenn team created the signs to look authentic. “It was hard not to kern the type and correct the purposeful mechanical mistakes in the layouts,” Byers admits. “We wanted the messages to seem like they were from Big Brother, and cause the audience do a double take.” The group’s ninja-like efforts paid off—it received over 100 appreciative e-mails for the installation, and visits to the We Love This Place website went from 20 to 180 per day. “We later tried to move a sign up higher on a pole,” Byers says. “A lady working nearby got very upset because we were moving ‘her’ sign.” Closing argument for not going through the proper municipal channels? “It is sometimes easier to ask for forgiveness than beg for permission,” Byers admits. Marcy Slane