Honest Slogans

About

Honest Slogans is a single topic blog featuring company logos with satirical taglines conveying widely held stereotypes or unpleasant truths that are omitted in brand advertising.

Origin

On December 30th, 2011, graphic designer Clif Dickens launched the Honest Slogans^[1] Tumblr blog, with the first post featuring the Q-Tip brand of cotton swabs logo edited with the slogan “You use them in your ears even though we say not to” (shown below).

Precursors

While parodies of corporate branding and advertisements have existed for decades through culture-jamming and postmodern art, especially street art, their association with honest consumer feedback began to develop more recently in early 2011, with Cracked’s Honest Movie Posters compilation in March, followed by Swedish graphic designer Viktor Hertz’ “Honest Logos”^[3] series series in April (shown below).

Spread

Honest Slogans remained relatively unnoticed until October 15th, 2013, when Redditor TeroTheTerror posted an Imgur gallery containing several notable examples from the blog to the /r/funny^[7] subreddit (shown below). Within four months, the post gained over 12,100 up votes and 640 comments. On October 23rd, The Huffington Post^[2] highlighted many of the same images from the Reddit post.

On October 29th, Business Insider^[4] published an interview with Honest Slogans creator Clif Dickens. On January 28th, 2014, Redditor BieverLord submitted another Imgur compilation of images from the blog to /r/funny,^[8] gathering more than 37,900 up votes and 1,900 comments in the first month. In the coming days, compilations of Honest Slogans images were posted on BuzzFeed^[5] and College Humor.^[6]