PICTURE CAPTIONS Why we don't need demotivators here.*
Seriously, don't put them here. They contribute nothing, and it's a tired joke.
"I think that communication skills have really improved around here since we all went on that course, and put up that blue poster that says 'Communicate!'"
"I totally agree; and I think that what that course showed me is that sometimes it does help to pay someone really quite a lot of money to state the obvious."
If you've ever been in a school or office environment, you've seen them: Posters encouraging the viewers to Reach For The Stars and to Never Give Up. Invariably, these lessons are accompanied by a cute picture or a vaguely inspirational stock photo. Are you feeling motivated yet?
One would have to be the most cynical misanthrope in the world to disagree with concepts like "Leadership" or "Teamwork", but one would also have to be the most optimistic Pollyanna in the world to deny that the presentation varies between painfully corny and unintentionally hilarious.
Thus, the Fauxtivational Poster was born in response. It takes diverse forms, all united in their use of the poster medium to play with the Motivational Poster. Some posters present a straightforward lesson, but exaggerate the Glurge to nonsensical levels. Others preach a patently ridiculous (or just particularly cynical) lesson. Still others use the Motivational Poster format to make a humorous statement about a completely different subject.
Successories is probably the most popular brand of Motivational Posters (inspiring many imitators); consequently most parodies follow the same layout that Successories popularized: A stock photo on a black background, with a one-word title in large text below, with a pithy saying or quote beneath that.
An Undead Horse Trope: Straight motivational posters are still in use in schools, offices, and some gyms (and prisons), but the parodies and subversions far outweigh straight uses everywhere else. Therefore, it's a classic example of the Weird Al Effect. Even when media does use straight Motivational Posters, it's almost always as an ironic counterpoint to some soul-crushing environment where the poster is hanging.
Parodies are often called "Demotivators" or "Demotivational Posters", regardless of their content; the name is taken from a series of posters by Despair Inc with genuinely demotivational themes. You have been warned.
Not surprisingly, there are various websites that let you make these poster patterns very easily. Which is why there are a ton of them floating around the internet.
Compare Faux To Guide. A specific type of Detournement.
Note: Adding fauxtivational posters as page images is frowned upon because the border rarely adds anything, but the wiki system imposes size limits, thus reducing the resolution. And we can do captions already.
Examples
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Films — Animated
In Megamind, upon taking over the city the titular supervillain has posters made of him in the style of the famous "Hope" poster of Barack Obama, except with the caption changed to read "No, You Can't" instead (referring to Obama's famous "Yes, We Can" message).
On Monsters vs. Aliens, the "Hang in there" poster is hung on Susan's cell in a pathethic attempt to make her imprisonment more tolerable. It doesn't work. "I want a real kitten, hanging from a real tree!"
In Igor, Dr. Glickenstein's girlfriend gets him an inspirational poster of a kitten hanging from a tree, but since the movie is set in a Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad world, the kitten is hanging from a noose. "To remind you to always take time in your day for a little torture."
Live-Action TV
Barney from How I Met Your Mother has a wall full of actual motivational posters, including a tailor made one for Awesomeness, but one seems decidedly fauxtivational which he showcased for Marshall (who questioned its motivational ability). It was an image of a group of Penguins, with the the text being the uplifting "Conformity: It's the one that's different that gets left out in the cold".
The Sarah Connor Chronicles has two: In Gnothi Seauton five bad ass resistance fighters have a cute kitten "hang in there baby" in their hideout, which conceals a safe. In Dungeons And Dragons the future resistance have a badass mural of the same theme, except it's a lion jumping out of fire, a Terminator skull in its jaws.
The Doublemeat Palace in season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has these in its employee break room, and manager's office. It is duly lampshaded:
Tara: I have this sudden urge to dedicate my productive cooperation...
Arrested Development: "Fun and Failure start the same way".
The IT Crowd: The basement has several memetastic posters hanging up.
Comicbooks
In PS238, the walls of the titular school are adorned with such posters as "Super Strength: If you don't have the power to move mountains, make friends with someone who can."
Videogames
Counter-Strike Source has a level set in an office building, with these posters on the walls. The topics are all related to Counterstrike itself, in-jokes for the established community that had played the previous version obsessively for several years. For instance, a picture of a tent, and the slogan "Camping".
Dead Space features motivational posters in certain areas; it would presumably be played straight, except the bright, happy posters with slogans like "Better Living through Science" etc are often seen next to scenes of Body Horror or Nightmare Fuel Unleaded.
From the F.E.A.R. factory level: "Remember it's Quantity, Quality, Safety, in that order."
In office level of Bloodrayne 2 there are several posters including a sinking boat and a picture of a marble with the caption "You are this sharp"
The Strong Bad email "no loafing". In addition to the eponymous sign, Strong Bad purchases some more traditional posters, featuring windsurfers and Space Whales.
Starslip Crisis had a Story Arc (beginning here) in which curator-snob Vanderbeam sees the "Hang In There" cat poster on Jovia's wall, and becomes obsessed with finding out what a fellow lover of True Art could possibly see in such a piece of obvious shlock.
This appears to be a literacy poster showing Kestrel from Queen Of Wands sitting in a beanbag chair with a book to illustrate the slogan "READ". On closer inspection, the book she's reading turns out to be titled "Porn".
4chan has a long, ancestral tradition of making sometimes very lewd Fauxtivational Posters based on their own memes. You can see them in Macrochan (OH-SO-GODDAMN-VERY NSFW!!!).
And basically every other -chan (especially those with a more... mature focus than 4chan.)
On that note, there used to be an anime motivational poster thread (nicknamed /amp/ or /mot/ as a homage to something...) on Crunchyroll that had about 2000+pages growing at about 8 pages daily. Unfortunately its contents started to live up to its name resulting in its deletion and a permanent ban against the creation of any other such threads.
Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday once commissioned a number of these.
Forum Warz has a whole minigame dedicated to creating these.
Worth1000, a site which organizes daily photoshop, photography and other contests, has also run some contests where people had to create posters with photoshopped images.
Encyclopedia Dramatica has a whole bunch, some that are hilarious, but after some you'll probably need to scrub your eyes (and those two types aren't mutually exclusive). You have been warned.
RPG Net used to have a monster thread full of specifically RPG-themed instances of this genre, but in the end it was deleted because of its server-crushing posting volume.
Western Animation
The Simpsons featured the "Hang in there!" cat poster. Marge notices that, since the copyright on the poster dates back to the 1968, the cat must be long dead, which she thinks makes the poster actually "kind of a downer".
It also had, in "And Maggie Makes Three", Homer's demotivational plaque: "Don't forget, you're here forever." Homer used pictures of Maggie to turn it into "Do it for her," in a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.
The "Hang in there!" poster also appears in Dr. Katz.
In the episode "Cryonic Woman", Leela reapplies for her old job at the cryonics center:
"Oh, I was hoping you would come back. I even saved your poster of a chimp expressing your distaste for Mondays!"
"Monday monkey lives for the weekend, sir!"
There was another one from the first episode which refers to the policy of people being assigned careers instead of choosing their own, which features a man in a hard-hat with a rather dubious look on his face giving a thumbs-up, with the caption "You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do".
Paying attention to the background nets a few more of these as well. In one episode, a poster outside an army recruitment office reads:
Played straight but subtle in Transformers Animated. When we see Prowl's room as he meditates, there's a poster of a cute little puppy on a branch reading "Chin up!" Made hilarious as one wonders where Prowl found the poster (that size) in the first place, and what prompted the Deadpan Snarker to hang it in his zen spot.
This is made interesting by the fact that it appears every time that room is shown. Possibly one of the writers has it in their office.
Family Guy. When Peter took over his father-in-law's company, Brian had a poster of a ball in his office that said "Go Get It. Go Get It, Boy".
A painful example of wildly inappropriate (and probably sadistically ironic) Straight Lesson in the wrong environment would be the infamous "Arbeit macht frei" (Work makes [you] free) at the entrance of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.
Another painful example is the use of so-called inspirational posters in a classroom whose teacher is so utterly repressive as to recite the occasional Dystopian Edict to the students.
