Posts Tagged ‘travel’

Everyone (or at least, every designer) loves a good “logos gone wrong” selec­tion. Most of them are just unin­ten­tion­ally dirty or besmirched by awk­ward kerning, but they’re always a good reminder of why you should always show your work to others before final­izing, just in case there’s a visual you might be missing. (And turn it upside down, too, just to make sure.)

So, to follow up on last week’s post about design in transit sys­tems, I thought I’d post a little tidbit I came across in Dubrovnik.

I’d just landed in town, ready for a new lan­guage, new cur­rency, and new adven­tures. I’d had about four hours of sleep, stretched out on a bench in the neon-lighted bar of the ferry from Italy to Croatia, and I was wan­dering about, trying to orient myself, with a back­pack the approx­i­mate size and weight of a bear strapped to my back. I head toward what looks like it might be a cash machine and I come across this delightful sign:

Don’t play with guns, alright, kids?

(more…)

Everyone who knows me at all knows I’m a fan of a good type­face (and a nice bottle of wine, and a pretty pair of shoes). Less common knowl­edge is my fond­ness for public transit.

Sure, it’s often dirty, loud, crowded, and out­moded. Often­times it’s a good way to run into people you’d rather avoid. But it’s an excel­lent mea­sure of the vitality of a city—its public transit system is the lifeblood of its “common” people, and a reflec­tion of how it treats them. Of course, the city in which I live has one of the most mis­er­able public transit sys­tems I’ve come across. I sold my little Honda Civic just before I left for five weeks in eastern Europe last summer, and I’ve been strug­gling to get by without it ever since. (Winter’s going to be fun.)

A year ago I found cheap air­fare to Mexico, and have since been taking off on a reg­ular basis, trav­eling about and becoming a bit of a dig­ital nomad (which is another story entirely). I’ve been lucky to do a decent bit of trav­eling since then, and I’ve taken buses, trains, sub­ways, fer­ries, and trams in var­ious cities across nine dif­ferent coun­tries, most of which spoke lan­guages unin­tel­li­gible to me. Given the lan­guage bar­rier, the fact that I was almost always solo, and the fact that I can get lost in a three-foot-square glass bubble, I started paying a lot of atten­tion to way­faring signage.

Mal­ostranská sta­tion in Praha

(more…)