50th St. Subway Art

I never noticed the subway art at the 50th St. ACE Subway station before. When I saw this designed icon system resembling the clear Swiss signage system icons, I had to take a photo.

Dumbo Walk

We took a bike ride through DUMBO a few weeks ago and stopped to walk around and check out some of the cool local art projects. I liked the color chip study as it reminded me of my college days in color class. I'm not sure what the dinosaur made from hubcaps was all about.

Brooklyn West Indian Festival 08

Living in Brooklyn has it charms. Not more then a mile from our place in Park Slope, we got to experience a taste of the Caribbean and West Indian culture. There is an annual parade that appears much like Carnival, with dancers in elaborate (and skimpy) colorful costumes. It's a madhouse spanning blocks and blocks along Eastern Parkway with many local foodstands. We had some delicious roti and jamaican jerk chicken. The festival seems to be just as much about the food as it is about watching the crazy parade!

Jones Beach

We also went to Jones Beach over labor day weekend. One of the most beautiful points on this long stretch of beach along Long Island. It's a popular escape for New Yorkers in the summer months. Of course, it's a bit hard to get to without a car which makes it all the more desirable a destination because the riff raff are kept away. We, being the riff raff, made this our first visit. We ate ice cream and watched the sunset as enormous seagulls begged for handouts.

Pet Cemetary

What started off as a harmless adventure to view Checker's grave, the beloved dog of our disgraced former president Richard Nixon ended in murder.... umm ha ha ha..

No just kidding, it really was a harmless adventure. We thought, what better way to spend a labor day weekend then visiting one of the best tourist attractions in the area, the largest Pet Cemetary in the vicinity. We were struck with how large the cemetary was an how old some of the graves were, some dated back 1918! One might think this a bit of an eerie adventure to mock the final resting places of beloved pets. But reading tombstones with the pet names engraved in true authenticy were hilarious!

Ohio Design

I came across the design work from a designer working at Pentagram - clearly a previous resident of Ohio. I found the design very playful and fun as well as promoting Ohio as a good place to be. Ohio often gets a bad wrap from it's coastal cousins as farm country-bumpkins but the state is actually quite populated by small cities and a diversity of academia propelling young people off to bigger and better jobs. But anyway, I digress. This post was only meant to capture the pro-ohio sentiment coming out in some designer's work these days that I'm happy to see!

Inspirational Typography from Veer

This young upstart stock photo house has been really catering to the design audience with great online and offline design to sell their photos. The Gettyimages giant which used to rule the roost has definitely had to step up to compete. Getty has even launched a new more 'designed' site to give it an edge. Although it is not only the nice design that Veer has going for it. Corbis also has had excellent design from the design firm T26 but yet they are still lagging as well. There is something about the simplicity of the pages, the ease of navigation and page load times that is seamless about Veer's integrated approach. All of their print mailers are also very smart and reflect in tone of voice and design the same feeling as the web site evokes.