Recycling a la Steinway

This moving sale sign has some creative recycling of a Steinway top, perfect for a table top. Just add legs. Now that's an easy recipe!

Found type

Position is everything in life. Is the location of this sign for exceptional painting at ordinary prices a sly and oblique hint? Or is it a mixed message? It's weird to see the signage in Albertus (or a family member).

Found type

Found type noticed while in Maine for my mother's 90th birthday. The book's very appearance at the Orr's Island Library sale makes it likely that the then 96-year-old giftee is no longer enjoying the memories mentioned in the inscription.

Answer (of sorts) To "Use Other Phone"

When signs mislead the user, some helpful, enterprising, and just plain frustrated people take communication into their own hands. The word-processed "THE HAND DRYERS ARE AUTOMATIC" taped onto a machine in Grand Central Terminal begged for the hand-written rejoinders "Doesn't work Get paper" and "Same for other one" and the most succint "Doesn't Fucking Work." The hand-drawn emoticons are my favorite touches.

Love among the trees

Some "classic" signage/grafitti found among the trees in the Frelinghuysen Arboritum, a lovely horticultural park in Morris County. I always wonder if these couples are still together.

Don't Worry; be prepared

This was the perfect bit of found type to see after a week which included summits n' seminars about eBooks and the evolution of books into . . . ?

Potluck

This flyer made me laugh. It seems to go completely against the idea of "potluck"!

Just one line, no pie zone

I love when people see something in a way that I've never seen it. By adding one line to the "No Smoking" sign, suddenly there are 3 dimensions...brilliant!

Notepads with syntax

Where type stands in for meaning and/or actual design. An excellent specimen set for my Typography class. Discuss. Alternatively, cry in your typography soup.

Knitting with marshmallows

I know that knitting+ has been popular for awhile now (like the ubiquitous stitch 'n bitch), but how am I supposed to drink hot cocoa while knitting? I thought knitting's function was to keep your hands busy!

That said, this is an excellent sampler on display at City Bakery on 18th And 5th (guess where I went recently to warm up) about a knitting/hot chocolate event. Even the logo is knitted.

By the way, if you haven't had it, their hot chocolate is absolutely killer...as are the scones!

Evergreen/Everbrilliant

I'm catching up with holiday cards (yes, my timing is either very Italian or very pathetic) and finally checked out the brilliant Pentagram holiday greeting, which helps you learn what type you are.

You may have already seen this—especially since Kurt Andersen (rightly) crowed about it in one of he Very Short List entries a while back. Also, the game has set the design world all a'Twitter. I think you'll find it not only a hoot for yourself, but a great exercise to do with your students. The guy (a very thin body type!) who plays the "shrink" is as brilliant as the concept and programming.

The ever lovely Keihl's

Keihl's beauty products have always had nice packaging, but their store is to die for. This clever sign is all about the avocado eye cream.

If at first you don't succeed

This has to be the best advice ever. When I discovered my fortune yesterday, I had another cookie at hand; it had a reassuring but far less striking message. This "fortune" put me in mind of our conversations about trying too hard—or painfully sticking at something when it's just never going to be right. Sometimes it's as simple as picking another fortune cookie. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it.

On a sort of related note, today I was tidying up and skimming-before-jettisoning ancient copies of The New Yorker. One article about Frank Gehry (Calvin Tompkins in the July 7, 1997 issue) talked about how at some point in the 1950s, Gehry went East to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and enrolled in the City Planning department. Tompkins wrote:

It was a mistake. City planning seemed to consist of endless group discussions, out of which came an endless flow of paperwork and not much else. He quit, and spent the rest of the year auditing all the Harvard courses that interested him. . . .

Another turning point was at the time Gehry had built his own house in Santa Monica and was working on Santa Monica Place,

"a fifty-million-dollar shopping center whose developer, the Rouse Company, was his most important commercial client . . . . Not lot after the shopping center was finished, the Rouse Company's president, Mathias DeVito, came to the Gehry's new house for dinner . . . "He sat there and looked around and didn't understand it at all," Gehry recalls. "He said, "You really like this? I said, 'Matt, this is the best thing I've ever done.'He said, "Well, if you like this, then you don't like that —pointing to the plan for the shopping center—so why do it?' I told him I didn't really want to, and he said in that case I shouldn't, and I agreed, and we shook hands and said we weren't going to work together anymore."

Picking another fortune cookie sure worked for Gehry.

Urban Scrawl

A little bit window; a little bit found type. I'm impressed by the slit-like dots over the "i"s—and by the contrast between the big fat "NOW HIRING" and the more . . . er . . . cursive phone numbers. Also, how nice that someone's hiring!

The pits

Given what's going on in Haiti, an open construction pit seems like nuttin.'

Dirty Ice

I love signs upon signs. But who would ever want to take ice out of this thing!?



Meanwhile I've started watching Dexter which makes this old ice bin look slightly sinister.

Mission Unscrambleable

Today's best found type comes from Pat, who spied these letters on the ground this morning while walking up Tarrytown's Main Street. Pat knew that movie people, including Keanu Reeves, are in town, but what kind of thriller is happening in our village? We still don't know, but the letters were for the reincarnation of The Tarrytown Music Hall as the Orpheum.

Photos by Pat O'Neill, using his iPhone

Conflouded by fish

Okay, so Beth and I went and grabbed some lunch at a nearby deli and we both spotted this sign. But I think I snapped the picture first?

Fireproofing

Furniture giant IKEA in Elizabeth, NJ was doing a little remodeling this season, and they cordoned off the aisles with this very utlitiarian "fabric". Is is Swedish for something?

Type that just seems to go together

You do the math. I'm a little afraid of both of these: the modern typeface for the Cecilia Bartoli with all its thick/thins,



and the fat "Bodoni on Steroids" look of this slab serif. Steroids joke courtesy Ellen Lupton.