Mid Bronx Haulage
Mid Bronx is a commercial garbage collection company that I found up by the job I’m on and they’ve been doing weekly collections from my site. Super nice guys and I really love the type treatment on their truck. It’s a classic industrial logo type. And they have great shirts to match. I managed to score one. XL. It looks like a dress on me. (Please don’t tell them.)
Scope Outlast packaging fail
Ok, so I am SUPER late to the party on this one, but I just saw the Scope Outlast bottle in the store and was really taken aback. I got four words: gypsy cab air freshener. As reported in the Dieline in 2009, brand management at Scope and the designers at Webb deVlam wanted to ensure the bottle would not be relegated to under sink cabinet status for reasons of exposing the brand and encouraging routine use. All well and good, so they went with a jewel and perfume bottle inspired form to elevate status by form association. Ok, also well and good, particularly when you think that Scope makes your breath smell fresh. Ok, doing great, and then along comes the semiotic disruptor– blue liquid!!! Noooooooo!!! So here’s a question: what’s a blue or brightly colored liquid that comes in a jewel like bottle so it can be elevated to above the counter status when really it’s trash? Four words: gypsy cab air freshener.
Albert Exergian TV posters
I missed the boat on this ages ago but my buddy JMR posted them on Facebook and they’re great. Art director Albert Exergian‘s super reduced modernist posters for popular tv shows as reported in the Guardian (Jan 2010). Being a man drawn to the simple nature of things and clever solutions, I have a particular fondness for the MacGyver poster with the paperclip. Good stuff. And good color. See more…
GE electric motor logo plate
The combination of the red GE logo plate against the teal blue body of this electric air compressor motor is gorgeous. Perfect 50s industrial color.
Btw, that’s the axle bearing housing there with a set screw on top for securing the bearing inside. It’s a perfect place for their logo in form and symbol.
Fire engines kick ass!!
A lot of people think that firetrucks are just a colorful and loud way of getting really awesome people in amazing outfits around town to do their hero’s work. It’s not that simple. Inside every hose truck, not to be confused with ladder truck, is an extremely sophisticated water pump engine that controls the flow from a hydrant through FDNY hoses or into a building’s sprinkler system to regulate and optimize hydrostatic pressure. You wanna talk about interaction design? Check that shit out!
Dated color
Believe it or not, this photo was taken today. The Impala (62?) is a dated color, but it’s the car with the mustard, blue and browns of the background houses that really push this image back about 40 or 50 years.
The Bank Note Building
My wife and I take the Bruckner Expressway a lot to and from her parents’ house and for years we’ve been admiring (at brief 60mph intervals) the redevelopment of a vast, old brick building in Hunts Point, Bronx, highlighted by yellow fire escapes and a big red smokestack. The Bank Note Building is so called for “The American Bank Note Company, a firm founded in 1795 to print currency, postage stamps, war bonds and stock certificates.” The firm relocated in 1985. The redevelopment of The Bank Note Building is nicely done, and I was recently happy to take on a new client with offices there. Check out the building’s site for more info and history.
Full color Depression pix
NPR had a piece last week about gorgeous Depression Era full color photographs. And they are amazing. That early 20th cent divergence when representational media went black & white as captured by photography and painting took its color into an abstract land of blobs and streaks left a hole in the collective memory that’s hard to color in. So it’s always a treat to see color from a period that seems only memorialized in black & white. These remind me of the late 90′s when UCLA restored and released John Ford’s full color footage of the landing at Normandy. Except with less red. See the full cache of photos at the LOC site.
Chevy Belair
I found this while shuffling through my old photos. Don’t know where to begin. It leaves me kind of speechless.
Legotron, Mark I: 4×5 camera made of Lego
I am probably late to the party on this one given the March publishing date but I needed to note it for combining two of my passions: analog photography and lego. I love any quirky thing made from Lego, but photographer Cary Norton has stolen the show by making a functioning 4×5 camera and some sharp exposures (with light leaks but so what they look great.) Also, the camera is gorgeous. Brava Cary! Read on…