I’m hardly the most well-versed person in typography —far less than a good old friend of mine who runs a burgeoning podcast on tales of the supernatural—but I enjoyed computer fonts enough as a child that I can still recognize some of the most prevalent ones from the late 80s up to the mid 90s.
By this point in the Tweaking Twenties, it’s hard think of any time during the week that a shopping mall would ever be jam-packed, so Thursday at 7:30 pm is just as good of a time as any. For the Springfield Town Center, the image below is probably typical for a summer weekday evening. Not
It’s been a tough decade or so for the American retail scene, a condition I’ve explored numerous times in the past. Social turbulence, exacerbated by a pandemic and the erratic response to it, only further maimed an already hobbled industry, facing persistent pressure from online commerce. The fact remains that people just don’t go out
I’ll concede at this point that small town revitalization has become sufficiently commonplace that finding a new example is hardly revelatory, even for those who aren’t really attuned to that sort of thing…because they never visit small towns, or because they just don’t care. It’s even less of a surprise if the municipality in question
Okay, since I toiled relentlessly in putting together those two Forest Fair Mall articles, I’m entitled to slack off for a post. And this time it’s not even a decent photograph; on a bright winter day it’s hard not to eliminate the hard shadows. Sorry about that. But the point still comes across, as will
My dead mall postings have routinely become some of my most popular articles, and I still have quite a few great spectacles that I could share someday, stored away in my photo archives. (In some cases, the aging photos chronicle a mall in its sunset years that has since closed completely.) I often avoid dead
In a quiet, mostly residential neighborhood in northern Washington DC, less than a half-mile from the Maryland border, a modest bit of new construction yields a subtle surprise.It doesn’t look like much, and, in most respects, it isn’t. Just a big new house, presumably multifamily (I’m guessing between two and four units), though maybe it’s
An evening stroll along the busy main drag in the Washington DC neighborhood of Mount Pleasant reveals the luminescence of a vertically oriented neon sign advertising a business, with four simple letters: “ELLE”. While hardly the stuff of Vegas, it’s distinctive on its own terms, because it belongs to a style infrequently seen on today’s
Regardless of the time of year, any coastal sunset should supersede something as stubbornly human-wrought as a church steeple. After all, the ephemerality of that palette reduces the comparable permanence of an opulent beachfront home—or even a charming fishing village—to banality.Yet here, along the north-central coast of California, in rural Sonoma County, far removed from
If we view advertising while wearing our semiotic skullcaps, we’re bound to come up with widely different conclusions than when we espy a brand, passing along in a car, simply for its promotional message. But that’s the point. When it comes to ads, who cares about the explicit—what the ad is actually saying? It’s the
I’m hardly the most well-versed person in typography —far less than a good old friend of mine who runs a burgeoning podcast on tales of the supernatural—but I enjoyed computer fonts enough as
By this point in the Tweaking Twenties, it’s hard think of any time during the week that a shopping mall would ever be jam-packed, so Thursday at 7:30 pm is just as good
It’s been a tough decade or so for the American retail scene, a condition I’ve explored numerous times in the past. Social turbulence, exacerbated by a pandemic and the erratic response to it,
I’ll concede at this point that small town revitalization has become sufficiently commonplace that finding a new example is hardly revelatory, even for those who aren’t really attuned to that sort of thing…because
Okay, since I toiled relentlessly in putting together those two Forest Fair Mall articles, I’m entitled to slack off for a post. And this time it’s not even a decent photograph; on a
My dead mall postings have routinely become some of my most popular articles, and I still have quite a few great spectacles that I could share someday, stored away in my photo archives.
In a quiet, mostly residential neighborhood in northern Washington DC, less than a half-mile from the Maryland border, a modest bit of new construction yields a subtle surprise.It doesn’t look like much, and,
An evening stroll along the busy main drag in the Washington DC neighborhood of Mount Pleasant reveals the luminescence of a vertically oriented neon sign advertising a business, with four simple letters: “ELLE”.
Regardless of the time of year, any coastal sunset should supersede something as stubbornly human-wrought as a church steeple. After all, the ephemerality of that palette reduces the comparable permanence of an opulent
If we view advertising while wearing our semiotic skullcaps, we’re bound to come up with widely different conclusions than when we espy a brand, passing along in a car, simply for its promotional