Inspiration | Guatemalan Signage

Each time I travel to a foreign land, I find myself fascinated by the ways in which other societies visually communicate information. I just spent a week in Guatemala and upon arriving, I immediately noticed that a huge majority of the signage, advertising, even traffic signs, are hand-painted. Almost every tienda is "sponsored" by one of the 3 large mobile phone companies, the entirety of their facades washed in bright blue, neon green, or white with red accents, the mobile company's logos and advertising messages emblazoned across the bright ground in enormous and near-perfect hand-brushed lettering. In a society where literacy is relatively low, many shops embellish their storefronts with hand-painted renderings of their popular offerings; in Monjas, a small town, the local hardware store has a large image of a wheelbarrow, concrete blocks and bags of cement—the building materials used to construct, by hand, nearly every home and shop. Real estate agents' and car dealers' storefronts feature carefully painted versions of the logos of world-class airlines and auto brands. Upon close inspection, one can see the rough pencil lines that were first transcribed onto the rough concrete surfaces, the imperfections in the letters where a painter has run out of room and squeezed the letters just a bit, simplified a detailed logo just a touch, or missed a letter or two. One can be sure that the painters are unlikely to have visited the places or spoken the languages whose words and icons they so dutifully reproduce again and again. These small flaws, the texture, the artists' hands, and the weathering, chipping and fading of the surface, make each sign or storefront one-of-a-kind, a permanent and unique piece of the visual landscape of the place, and so much richer than our vinyl banners and rotating billboards and light-up signs, changed each week to highlight the newest sale or the latest company rebrand.

For more images, see here.











For more images, see here.

Events | Compostmodern ME

Compostmodern ME is an interdisciplinary conference constructed to help designers of all stripes, manufacturers, business-people, and social and civic planners and leaders to explore the range of sustainable design thinking necessary to create a socially and ecologically responsible society.

This, the first local conference, is born out of the national Compostmodern event held in San Francisco each year. Content will include webcasts from the national event, live presentations from local experts, and interactive discussions about design thinking and sustainability.

I've seen several of the national webcasts and they are extremely informative, inspiring, and, in some cases, challenging. If you're interested in sustainable design, responsible business, or healthier, more balanced products, environment and society, join AIGA and fellow sustainability thinkers at Compostmodern ME; it takes place Saturday, May 9, 2009 at One Longfellow Square in Portland.

Learn more and register at http://maine.aiga.org.

Vintage x-ray images

I love the shapes of the skeletons of things. And of course documentation of medical oddities is endlessly fascinating. I could spend days in the Mutter Museum.

So today, I wanted to post more images from the National Museum of Health and Medicine's public archive of US Army medical imagery. This time, vintage x-rays.

(Images shown subject to Creative Commons License)

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The first two are beautiful images of things that are usually hidden on the insides of us (and a rattle snake).






This is, apparently, a grenade embedded in someone's forehead, taken during the Vietnam War:




And this, one of the more disturbing but visually interesting things I've seen lately, is the after-effects of self-mutilation with graphophone needles:

Smells like musty hay (WWII PSA Posters)

I'm always drawn to vintage images and design, and I have a special fondness for the tactics used in public service and propaganda posters, and how that imagery and messaging has changed over the years.

A friend just sent me a link to a blog entry about a massive archive of US Army medical illustrations and photos that the National Museum of Health and Medicine is making available on Flickr for public use. The whole collection is amazing but my eye was immediately drawn to these World War II poison gas warning posters:

(Images shown subject to Creative Commons License)