Neo Communist April Fools Cat Propaganda

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NEO-COMMUNIST APRIL FOOLS CAT PROPAGANDA

Every April Fool’s Day, deviantART plays host to a complicated prank like so many larger websites do. For 2012, the prank saw a revolutionary uprising of a cat army, dubbed the Feline UpRising (FUR). FUR’s leader, Major General Whiskers, populated the site with “mandatory cat education,” which were pop-overs of cat facts.
To support the prank, I illustrated a series of propaganda posters inspired heavily by western civilization’s familiarity with propaganda of the past, namely WW2-era and Communist posters. The intent was, after all, to indicate that FUR was an evil uprising of cats, so naturally the propaganda posters should reference similarly evil regimes.

Additionally, I designed a landing page to play host to the event, where Major General Whiskers explained his dastardly plot, which also involved a well-rendered vial-like progress bar, indicating the quantity of cat-related artworks uploaded to the site to appease the Major General. This landing page broke some records, too.

FUR’s landing page became the most popular landing page ever made by deviantART, breaking comment and pageview records, with 55,114 comments and 535,094 pageviews in one single day.