At maybe 200 sq.ft., this elegant and richly appointed store in Tribeca is how all cigar stores should be: intimate, colorful and layered with the patina of use. Stopping in here is like going back to a time when men were men, and cigars and the requisite accoutrement combined to… Read more »
Getting you oriented and helping you stay that way is the first job of wayfinding. You need to know where you are in order to find somewhere else. Many environments have integral orientation features — the church tower in a small town, the central rotunda in a Beaux-Arts museum, even… Read more »
We’ll vote for you if you agree not to degrade the landscape with trashy signs. Littering is illegal; so is installing non-permitted signs. So why do we put up with this tacky and environmentally demeaning visual clutter all over our country every election season? These (17!) particularly egregious examples are… Read more »
Yeah? So did every other kid. All the restaurants we go to seem to have an A rating. No grading on a curve here – everyone seems to get an A from the Los Angeles Department of Health. There are apparently a lot of good restaurants with clean kitchens and… Read more »
You don’t need to be a sailor to appreciate the wide variety of colorful names painted on the sterns of nearly all private boats. They come in a range of flavors from the poetic (Windsong, Pacific Tide) to the aggressively descriptive (Prowler, Island Hopper) to the girlfriend with two names… Read more »
Wayfinding is the act of self-guiding. Wayfinding is gaining an understanding of where you are relative to other things in your environment and then moving successfully and intentionally to another location. A m is the strategically organized set of tools that facilitate successful wayfinding – signs, maps, icons, color systems… Read more »
Okay, it’s really in Santa Monica. But as an entrance to a unique and energetic place — the pier — in a colorful seaside city, this 1940’s commercial archway has become an inadvertent regional icon.
The Federal Highway Administration has ordered NYC to replace all of their existing street signs from those with all capital letters to ones with upper-lower case letters. So “BROADWAY” will soon read “Broadway”. Clearview will be the typeface of choice on the new signs. Upper-lower case typography is much more legible… Read more »
With the recent opening of the Poseidon Undersea Resort, I realized we were one step closer to my childhood dreams of living under the sea. I’ve always wanted the recessed lighting, the flickering rays of sunlight with schools of fish swimming past the living room windows. I never thought it… Read more »
This American Life on NPR had a wonderfully balanced story about Americans with Disabilities Act this weekend. The story discusses how federally and state mandated ADA laws help those with disabilities but there is no one to enforce it except those who sue property and business owners. Tom Mundy, someone who’s… Read more »