Smoking has never been more frowned-upon (though the masks we wear hide those frowns) but these No Smoking signs hammer down the nail for those who inhale.
Where There’s Fire There’s…
From the “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room!” department comes this rather ironic and counter-productive No Smoking sign posted in the parking lot of the Dragon School in Oxford, UK. But how am I going to train my dragon now? Adding insult to injury, the upper-crust prep school states they “educate(s) boys and girls from 4-13 years” so realistically those “kids” shouldn’t be smoking, not to mention driving. (images at top and above via Gwydion M. Williams)
Smoked Lenses
This weirdly minimalist No Smoking sign from Vancouver, BC, Canada seems to throw shade at smokers by casting their chosen nicotine delivery system in a dim light. Either that or the graphic implies a sort of Big Brother-ish “we’re watching you smoke” atmosphere in which not only do the walls have ears, the cigarettes have eyes. (image via Stephen Rees)
Big Cat vs Big Tobacco
Texas may be famed for their dee-licious BBQ featuring fall-off-the-bone beef but we always assumed the meat came from tasty cows, not tasty cats. Oh wait, TESTY Tigers… whew, that’s a relief – from both our point of view and that of the tigers at Waco’s Cameron Park Zoo. Come to think of it, from the tigers’ POV humans are quite tasty, bbq’d or not. (image via Sarah Page)
Bus-ted
Remember Singapore, the southeast Asian city-state where chewing gum is banned and violators get caned? Yeah, they’re not big on smoking either, which is hardly a surprise. Indeed, there’s really no getting away from the anti-nicotine nannyism: in capitalist Singapore, No Smoking sign follow YOU! (image via Jeriel Lim)
X’s & Ohs
A picture might be worth a thousand words but we still have MANY questions for whomever designed the above No Smoking sign from downtown Tokyo, Japan. For instance, what’s with the oddly symmetrical, lightbulb-shaped “cloud” of smoke? Why does the strange spherical creature have an x’d-out eye (usually reserved for deceased cartoon characters), and what the heck did it step into? As for the army of similar yet miniature characters marching along the bottom of the sign, we can only ask “WHY?” (image via karanj)
Firedogs?
We’ve “put out the cat” many times before but it was never on fire at the time! Goes to show you what can happen when you have limited space on a sign and try to cut corners with the text. By the way, if your pets are smoking then you’re a bad pet-owner and you should feel bad. (image via Eugeniu Rotari)
Ever wonder how the world discourages public smoking? Check out Butt Out: A Dozen International No Smoking Signs!
