Grand National

Inspired by the postcard of a 1939 WPA poster from your summer 2013 cross country trip, I checked out Ranger Doug's site. The Grand Canyon is just one of the fabulous art homages designed for the National Parks between 1935 and 1943—and returned to life decades later by Doug Leen. 

The history is indeed "rangers of the lost art." In 1973, while a seasonal park ranger, Doug Leen discovered a 1938 Grand Teton beaut (as in "beauty" not "butte") destined for the park burn pile. As the site's history section notes, the poster piqued Leen's curiosity, and "a 20-year effort led him to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where 13 black-and-white negatives survived in the file drawers of the National Park Service archives. These negatives and the single Teton poster, then the only one known to survive (and the first poster designed by the Federal Poster Project for the national parks), were used as templates."

In addition to showing and selling its gorgeously-reconstructed silkscreened posters, rangerdoug.com reveals the rich history of the poor times in the mid-1930s to pre-World War II. According to the site, FDR's WPA employed more than 8 million workers—with seven percent of the WPA budget going for arts projects such as murals and posters—and a few years into the program, posters for the National Park Service.

I bought the Yellowstone, Acadia, and Arches posters for the office, to recall three faves of my numerous national park visits. The posters, masterpieces of silkscreening, are even more glorious than they look online; in the flesh/paper/ink, they're rich and tactile.

Do you know of any examples of gorgeous art and/or design fostered by the US government during our current recession?

The Grand Canyon and Teton posters are screenshots from Ranger Doug's site. Yellowstone, Acadia, and Arches are my quick shots of purchased posters and don't do justice to the colors or the feel of the silkscreens.

Overkill

Type on trees

Tree type (and 2 carvers).

Empanada typography

Ok, so these are the best empanadas I've ever had (from El Artesano in Union City). But even better is stamp/press they use in the crimped edges to emboss their name!

Not like that anymore

Down on West 13th Street, a lovely bit of patinaed signage. I guess Benny replaced somebody but the sign was too good to change!

Unexpected Adaptation

An article about the Faber-Castell pencil company in The New York Times is a great study in evolution, brand extension, and faith in the power of using digits as well as the digital.

What would Isa Genzken do?

How can multiples of address labels turn into a statement about guilt (or guilting) and support? For years, we've kept return address labels from Amnesty Inernational, Sloan Kettering, Alzheimer's, Ronald McDonald-house, and you-name-it, thinking that there's a concept, card, or art involved in out donation (or potential donation). Happy to donate to a good cause, I'm less sanguine about using an address sticker with nasty beach art (full disclosure: I draw really badly. Really. Badly.). Not surprisingly, the return address labels for Dwell magazine were the most arresting. Ideas? Let me know. (Another full disclosure: I've jettisoned these labels but can amass more in a trice.)

For a brilliant look at repurposing stuff, cf. Isa Genzken or the student work currently on display through Sunday, December 8 at Cooper Union.

American Billboards

Steven Heller's eloquent tribute to Dr. James Howard Fraser jogged me into revisiting The American Billboard: 100 Years (Abrams, 1991; designed by Ray Hooper), which is just one of the many projects Mr. Heller noted.  Dr. Fraser's book is a clever landscape format, with rich historical backgrounds (and with illustrations of billboards that would now be politically incorrect indeed). According to Fraser, ever since 1871, advertising industry leaders had wanted to introduce "the concept of placing a poster on a structure especially designed for it, rather than simply pasting it on a fence or the side of a building."

Dr. Fraser includes a billboard for Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco, which Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company introduced in 1897, "and advertised it on barns and painted signs until the mid-teens [that's mid 19-teens!], when they began to put it on billboards." The shot, above, from the book shows a 1919 billboard.

I love the billboard, but I must admit I also love the painted barns, which I've photographed—often from a moving car—whenever possible.

Another wonderful find in Dr. Fraser's American Billboards is Dorothy Shepard's 1937 ad for Pabst Beer, which looks like a nod to A. M. Cassandre's Dubonnet man. Mr. Pabst, meet Monsieur Dubonnet.

Signage; a matter of life or death

Today's Metro North train derailment in the Bronx, NY, is awful, tragic, and unimaginable (doh, but real). Watching news interviews with numerous Bronx residents, I was struck by one articulate couple who gave detailed descriptions of the crash sounds and aftermath. One of the interviewees said she had to point out something important—and continued, noting that road signs in the Bronx are bad. Because of misleading signage, first responders lost not just a few possibly around 15 minutes arriving at the scene. Moral tag: clear design (planning, placement, typography) can save lives.