How cool is this poster?

Mike Rosulek used Charles Darwin’s portrait in a parody of the Obama campaign posters designed by Shepard Fairey.

The Obama campaign posters were so popular that they were imitated by politicians in other parts of the world – during her campaign for prime minister of Israel, Tzipi Livni used posters with a Fairey-like image of her over the word “Believni.”

Mike is a graduate student in computer science at the University of Illinois. In August he will graduate and head to the University of Montana as an assistant professor. His specialty is theoretical aspects of cryptography.

“I wanted to do something clever for Darwin’s 200th birthday,” Mike told me. A few months ago he made a self-portrait parody of the iconic Fairey poster, which inspired him to try the same using Darwin’s visage. “The concept of evolution fit nicely with the Obama campaign’s rhetoric of change, so the slogan ‘(Very gradual) change we can believe in’ practically wrote itself.” You can find more variations on this theme on Mike’s blog.

Money from the sale of Mike’s designs will go to the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in public schools in the United States.

So far more than 500 items have been sold, bringing in more than $1,500.

Mike used a public-domain photograph of Darwin as an old man and generated the Fairey-like image himself, without using an automated online tool, working a couple of hours a day for three days.

The tributes to Darwin take so many creative forms. When will the Alfred Wallace version be available?