In the year 2000 a long forgotten wartime poster was discovered by a bookshop in Alnwick, Northumberland. Originally printed as part of a series of three wartime posters, the Keep Calm and Carry On poster had become a mere memory until Barter Books discovered a rare original print in a second-hand book auction and started a phenomenon…
The couple who owned the second-hand bookshop, Stuart and Mary Manley, were really taken with the poster and decided to have it framed and put up in their store. Customers shared their appreciation of the simple, yet inspiring, poster and soon the Manley’s started printing reproductions and the popularity of the poster has grown since then.
The posters were designed to have a simple and straightforward font with no images except for the crown of George VI. The first of these said Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will Bring Us Victory had over a million prints, the second which said Freedom is in Peril had 600,000 posters issued and the third, Keep Calm, had over 2,5 million printed.
So why was the poster never seen? Because it had been saved for times of crisis or invasion and was never used and soon forgotten. This poster is now on t-shirts, mugs, cups and walls everywhere. So how come I’m writing about here? Well, it’s because this poster and its simple but evocative sentiment has inspired people to believe in themselves and to take a much needed breath when times get tough, and has been a part of the ethos driving the Tech in Style team, inspiring them to keep going and do more.
Keep Calm and Carry On has also been adapted in a wide variety of truly funny ways. And it is these modifications that have seen the arrival of a rather fabulous app that you can download onto your Transformer and use to create your very own Keep Calm and Carry On poster. We had a lot of fun here at Tech in Style making our own posters to inspire us, as you can see from the image above.
Why not give it a bash yourself and see what kind of inspirational, funny or clever poster you can devise? The app is really easy to use and will definitely give you something to do as you sit with your Eee Pad Transformer on the long commute.
Mrs Mario
Mrs.Mario is a freelance journalist who loves to write about anything and everything. She accidentally fell into the cauldron of technology about eight years ago and has been slowly simmering in there ever since. She’s a geek but still has tons to learn about the wonderful world of technology. She also suffers from a rare disease known as “need to game” that demands it’s sufferers play at least one videogame a week. So far, she’s been coping with her ailment admirably.