Our Portsmouth Parking Poster Parody

Decades ago, a group of us formed a creative services agency called Ideaworks. We intially settled into an office on Pleasasnt Street, in the upstairs of what was once Gallagher’s Sport Shop. The collaborative included a writer, photographer, videographer, designer, and illustrator. We moved to Dover for a few years, then back to Portsmouth for two more downtown offices.

Parking was as much a problem in the 1980s as today. Ralph Morang had a an idea. In he days before Photoshop, he carefully cut and pasted black and white photos of vehicles against a shot of the Portsmouth Athenaeum in Market Square. Then he rephotographed the assemblage. We turned the picture into a parody poster that read: Beautiful downtown Portsmouth. Always a parking space.

With the help of a couple of local businesses, we printed and laminated about 100 posters. It was a costly process. The idea was to showcase out creative services company. People loved the poster. One copy hung in a downtown restaurant for decades. I’m not sure it ever brought in a new customer, but we did win an award at a local tradeshow.