A poster that counts its own replies

On bone, a flyer flat and complete, its lower third scissor-cut into eleven narrow strips. Three are missing, leaving three gaps side by side; eight strips still hang, a little unevenly, and every one of them carries the same seven digits: 0881492.

Above the fringe, nothing else — no image, no name, no date. Just the strips doing the work.

A tear-off strip turns a flat poster into a piece of infrastructure with a counter built into it, and three gone out of eleven is a number anyone walking past can read without touching the paper.

What are the strips at the bottom of a flyer for?

Carrying a number away from the wall.

Everything above the fringe stays fixed in place, the way a card pinned to a shop's board stays fixed until somebody covers it. Everything below the fringe is designed to leave — a strip is cut so a single interested passer-by can take exactly one piece of contact information without needing a pen, a photograph or a conversation with whoever put the flyer up.

Why does the same number repeat on every strip?

Because each strip has to work alone, with no memory of the poster it came from.

By the time somebody dials, the strip is folded in a pocket with no poster attached to it and no context above it — so the number can't be split across the sheet or shortened against a header. Printing the full seven digits on all eleven strips means any single one, torn at random, still functions completely on its own.

Why cut eleven strips, and why are three gone?

Eleven is what fit along the width available; three gone is what people actually did about it.

That's the part a shop window with no strips never gives you: three gaps, publicly visible, updating the moment somebody tears the fourth. No survey, no dashboard — a flyer reporting its own response rate to the next person who walks past it, in the same square metre a fresh flyer occupies for about a week. The number printed on each strip never changes; it's the count of strips left that carries the information.

Why are the strips uneven instead of identical?

Because they were cut with scissors, once, by one person, not stamped by a machine.

Eleven straight cuts by hand drift a little — a strip a few millimetres narrower than its neighbour, a fringe that doesn't sit perfectly level. That's the production standard the whole object was made under, and it's a truer signature than a printed logo would be: a machine-cut sheet would make every strip the exact same width, and this one doesn't.

Can I print a real phone number on the strips?

A real number belongs to whoever answers it, and putting it on a run of shirts hands strangers a way to reach that person indefinitely, not for a week — so invent the digits.

0881492 isn't a working number in this design and doesn't need to be one for the object to read correctly. What sells the format is the repetition and the cut, not whether somebody could actually dial it.

Does this work for something other than a phone number?

The strips don't care what's printed on them — a web address, a room number, three words and an arrow all work the same way, provided each strip carries the whole piece of information alone. It's the same requirement as a classified ad that lists a phone as a hard qualification: whatever's written has to stand on its own, with nothing else on the page to back it up.

Does it print well?

Yes — it's built from hard shapes: straight cuts, small mono-spaced digits, one flat background. No gradients, no fine linework above the fringe. The strips read best in a single ink against the poster's base colour, and the unevenness between them is a texture a print can hold onto rather than something it has to smooth away.

How do I get one made?

Describe the flyer at JustOG — how many strips, what number, how many are already gone. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Eight strips left. Somebody's going to take a ninth.