The beauty of Amsterdam

I often joke with my students that I'm a nightmare to travel with because I'm always taking shots of typography to share with them! In Amsterdam, I was delighted by the gorgeous hand painted script faces:

Idiosyncratic stacking:

Fresh use of Helvetica:

And this... an undeniably gorgeous tweak on Garamond for the signage for the Plantage district, designed by Dijkhuis+Dijkstra. (And is that Eric Spiekermann's ubiquitous Meta typeface there for the text?)

Rain, rain, rain

This rain courtesy of North Carolina and its plethora of RFD (rural free delivery) mailboxes.

Safety First

Leaving the normal bubble makes me look at things as if they were totally new. Today's revelation, on planes to Denver by way of Minneapolis, was about Safety Cards and Gradients. Gradients often look cheesy. But the inflatable life vest is the perfect use of flat (uninflated) and gradients (inflated). A gradient gives volume to the inflated vest of a preternaturally-calm traveler.

Simple, universal icons aren't so simple to do. On the "Exit if" info shown below, the fire looks friendly (popcorn anyone) and the debris looks like styrofoam.

Of course, you don't want a Safety Card to show terrified people holding their heads and screaming; stylization is the only way to go. That said, panels 3 and 4 are amusingly playful. I particularly enjoy the intrepid "we can do it" woman in the blue skirt, arms akimbo.

Finally, one segmment shows a baby every mother must love in a catastrophe: a child who'll calmly stay with arms outstretched throughout the vest-donning process. I've never been a mother, but I imagine that the instructions will be jettisoned in favor of instinct to make sure the real child stays as calm as the kid below.

Trip Detritus

There were other cool things to see and do on our NJ=PA=WV=OH=IN trip. Notably the beautifully elegant (and Brancusi-ish; thank you Dr. Martin Rayala for that apt description) windmills in a Pennsyvania windfarm. In this photo, one of the windmills is being repaired, which is the only way we got a sense of the scale of these things...huge!



Also, there was more wonderful installation art to be found at the Mattress Factory, including Renee Piechocki's "Guestroom for Lareese's Dream" (2009), which has one of the prettiest blues I've ever seen on the walls along with topographical map line drawings on the floor.


Also notable was Drew Pavelchak's "Staple Approach" (2009) that featured a kinetic chattering stapler.


And this lovely bit of business by an artist whose name escapes me (but the card is somewhere and I'll find it sometime) that had a body-size drawing (or carving) on the wall and this umbrella over the light fixture.


While in Indiana, we had an opportunity to go to the Wonderlab, which is the Museum of Science, Health, and Technology in Bloomington, IN, and just a fantastic place to take kids. One of the permanent exhibits they have is a see-through beehive that is inside the museum (but the bees can fly out to garden outside to collect pollen and go disco dancing through a see-through pipe). I have been interested in bees for awhile now, and this was a great chance to get to watch them for an extended period of time.


Lastly, in Bloomington we came across one of the nicest graffiti I've ever seen, on the side of an abandoned market.

And that's what I did on my summer vacation.

Next stop, Monroe County Fair

We arrived in Indiana in time for the County Fair.

Well, I'd been to the New Jersey State Fair which did prepare me a bit...there was 4H livestock everywhere! Miss You-Know-Who was in wonderland here. We're lucky we didn't go home with a goat!



Some amazing looking prize animals (yes, that's a rabbit),


and as expected, some great signage!

Take the A Train

Not design exactly, but I took the A train out to Broad Channel, Queens (one stop before Rockaway Beach) and took a hike through the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Them there's some osprey in this photo. Broad Channel is like Venice in that the subway goes across the water and drops you off—weird, but recommended!