What is an Obamicon, you ask? Well, it’s a four-color visual representation of any image designed to resemble Shepard Fairey‘s famous poster (below) depicting President Barack Obama and the word “hope,” a key term from the leader’s 2008 campaign.

Thanks to Paste Magazine and their Web site project, Obamicon.me, users from around the world can easily upload an image of their choosing and caption it with any word or short phrase. As you can see, the end results aren’t perfect, but they are pretty close.

They’re so close, in fact, that users worldwide have generated more than 150,000 icons since the site launched two weeks ago.

While this internet meme might never see the massive success of I Can Has Cheezburger‘s famed Lolcats or even Rickrolling‘s accidental star, ’80s pop artist Rick Astley, don’t be surprised if you start finding Obamicons in unexpected places. Not only are users setting their icons as profile images on sites like Facebook and MySpace, but some are also using Obamicon to borrow from the famous “fail” meme. (You can see other fail meme examples here.)

All in all, I think Obamicon makes for a pretty fun site. Below are a few of my favorite images that others have created. You can see more on the Obamicon site.

I can has memes?

I’d vote for him.

Damn it, House! It’s never lupus!