Tuesday, April 28, 2009

My million dollar idea—good thing I Googled it.



Yesterday I passed a homeless man with a sign and I had this great idea to get a design book together of homeless signs and give the proceeds to the homeless. Luckily I googled the idea before I started . . . hello Pentagram Paper 39, released not even a month ago, designed by DJ Stout with homeless signs collected by Joe Ely. It looks fantastic and is absolutely in the right spirit of collaboration and charity. Proceeds go to Mobile Loaves & Fishes.

3 comments:

Beth Tondreau said...

It just goes to show that a good idea often stems from more than one source. Didn't Crick and Watson work on finding the double helix at the same time as their colleagues/competitors Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins? (Franklin seems to have been done in by sexism as well as cancer, but at least the former is another post.

Of course, I wonder if you're giving proceeds to charity if it's really a million dollar idea—BUT it's still a great idea!

The hand-written signs are wonderful. I'm torn between being humbled and analytical. The lettering is great—and shows one reason that brilliant designers like James Victore stress the importance of putting your hand (literally) and heart into your work.

On a contradictory note, it seems cold and too cerebral and distant to go all academic about the lettering, but I've gotta point out that a lot of these signs look pretty polished."Native American. God bless." is very sophisticated. And "Hungry! 25c would help wife—n—M EAT! GOD BLESS" is very carefully laid out indeed. Finally, the outline type on "THANK-U for SHARING & CARING" shows that everybody's a designer. Is it such a bad economy that people with communication skills are letting signs? Has our digital age made the world more sophisticated? . Did Hawk, who was BLINDED and ROBBED and needs HELP (red, outlined) get someone to do his sign? I'm normally numbingly sincere. I don't know why I'm so coldly fixating on the sophistication of these signs.

Beth Tondreau said...

Sorry about missing close parens and spotty punctuation!

Suzanne Dell'Orto said...

"I was blinded while being robbed."
There's something to that.