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In: Design

Our annual New Year’s ritual of doing some house cleaning and organizing, throwing things out and making room for all the stuff we got as Xmas gifts, yielded this small trove of matchbooks and matchboxes. We must have picked up these from various restaurants and shops because the designs struckContinue Reading

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In: Spaces, Places & Architecture

The branding of coffee roaster and cafe Common Room in Costa Mesa, California is a simple two-dimensional, flat icon of a coffee cup and saucer. It appears repeated in a diagonal pattern across the cafe’s exterior, a gray single-story brick warehouse-type building in a light-industrial business park devoid of shopsContinue Reading

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In: Design, Urban Life

The international symbols for man and woman often used on signage for restrooms at airports, museums, restaurants and public places, etc., throughout the world are sometimes reinterpreted by designers. We noticed a lot of variations on the symbols at various places in Amsterdam on our recent visit there. Pictured hereContinue Reading

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In: Street Art

A sparkly fresh new wheat-paste street art piece by the artist Raemann on Lafayette Street in NoHo, downtown New City. “Smart Air” is another in series of artworks that depict “bottled air” as a consumer product branded with the logos of popular bottled-water brands, such as Dasani, Perrier, Poland Spring,Continue Reading

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In: Design, Media & Advertising

Brand-awareness ads in magazines rarely come as simple, bold and minimalist as this two-page spread for the Italian bicycle maker Bianchi in the Dutch cycling mag Soigneur. Aside from logotype and slogan on aquamarine-like blue, the pages are blank. Love love love the color.

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In: Media & Advertising

These wheat-pasted Alife ad posters on Crosby Street, in SoHo, are trying to be provocative but feel conceptually kind of tired to us, even though we’re seeing them here for the first time. We suppose the ads work on a brand-awareness level, since we’d forgotten the clothing brand and hadn’tContinue Reading

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In: Design, Street Art

This graphic on a wall in Shibuya, in Tokyo, looks and feels like a piece of street art and could have been created by stencil, paint-print, heat transfer or painted by hand. It may be graphical logo for a restaurant or company brand mark. Whatever it is, we think it’sContinue Reading

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A super-cool, vintage-modern Air France airport sign for sale at the famous vide-grenier, a type of French flea market (or marche au puces) on the Rue de Bretagne in the fashionable and art-filled Le Marais neighborhood of Paris.