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The other day I was making signs at Loaf and Nancy asked if I wanted to laminate them. God, no, I said. Of course not. These are “proper” signs, and you don’t laminate proper signs.
The laminated sign is a curious thing. The fact that it is laminated indicates it is designed to be permanent, to protect it from wear and tear and prevent alteration. It encases a statement for now and the future in wipe-clean plastic.
But the laminated sign is also a transgression. In the hierarchy of the sorts of organisations where persons have access to a laminator, they are produced by those at the bottom, not the top. Those at the top can influence the professional sign making strategy and implement their wishes without having to use the laminator.
Those at the bottom, who have to work within a corporate system which cannot scale down to appreciate the nuance of their day to day existence, will use whatever they can to make their job easier, to get things done. The laminator, along with the desktop printer, is a vital tool in this guerrilla war against a system which prioritises design visions above practicality.
The laminated sign is a correction employed by the powerless in defiance of the powerful. It is never on brand, its vernacular design an offence to the values of head office. For this reason it is regularly hunted down and destroyed whenever higher-ups deign to visit their domains up close. The laminated sign tells the king he is wrong, and no-one can tell the king he is wrong because the king is god.
The laminated sign epitomises the utopian / dystopian dichotomy. The more one seeks efficiency and order, the more one attempts to smooth the rough edges, the more laminated signs will be produced by those who have to deal with the reality of inefficient chaos.
The laminated sign shows your ideology has failed. Your authoritarian dictatorship cannot suppress the anarchy of people’s desire and your under-paid, under-appreciated, under-consulted underlings have admitted defeat. They are re-writing your policy, one laminated sign at a time.
The revolution will be laminated, and the revolution will succeed only when the laminators have gathered dust.
