Over the past ten years, I’ve photographed every town in North Dakota, plus many places in eastern Washington, and some in Montana, Saskatchewan, and Minnesota too. Now through October 25, 2012 I’m doing a Kickstarter to sell 2 different photo books and some other fun stuff, all to help fund a new project focusing on some of the smallest places in the west. Check it out here.

With the announcement of 2000 firings, and the statement that 2000 firings was “a drop in the bucket“, the Union of Concerned Photographers moves the flickr Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight. “Every round of indiscriminate firings at Yahoo! increases the possibility of the extinction of flickr, or worse yet, the possibility flickr might be bought by Microsoft and turned into Windows Live Photos 8.”

dnl() {
  err=0
  for x in "$@" ; do
    if [[ -f "$x" && `stat -f %l "$x"` -gt 1 ]] ; then
      unlink "$x" || err=1
    else
      err=1
    fi
  done

  return $err
}

One thing: this operation is not atomic — if that is important in your use case, please do not use this.

The Nikon D3100 is a great camera for the price, the bottom end of Nikon’s DSLR range. Being a bottom-end camera, a few things are missing, like an external power connector. I’m using this camera in a fixed setup for slide scanning. The 1080p live view makes an excellent way to preview slides on an HDMI monitor, but this will drain the battery quickly. One option is to use the Nikon EP-5A, which is basically a battery-like plug for the camera, which then attaches to the Nikon EH-5A power supply. This will run you about about $108 at B&H. A spare battery will run you another $50. None of the third-party batteries available apparently work in the D3100, as Nikon puts some sort of inkjet cartridge-style money-sucking chip inside their batteries. (I’m sure the vast camera accessory factories in China are working to overcome this issue).

It turns out the answer to both these problems is a third-party D3100 battery grip, $20something from Amazon.

The left-hand battery slot in the D3100 will take the $8 third-party batteries, as the camera is happy as long as it can see a Nikon battery when it starts up. I decided to add a barrel type power jack so I can power the camera off a power supply. I suppose it’s possible that all these infidel non-Nikon parts could cause the camera to explode, so don’t try this at home, kids.

The battery grip contains a circuit board that runs the whole width.

I attached the barrel plug to the left-hand (“infidel”) battery slot. In this photo, Green is – and White is +. Most DC power supplies are center-positive, and so I used that scheme here. I picked a spot for the barrel plug that puts it right against the battery slot so it can’t easily pop out. I carefully drilled a hole in the case, squared it off, and hot glued it in.

It works perfectly. You can even remove the genuine battery once the camera is booted.

Cloud County 765

Photo by Jake on the AARoads Blog.

201_0291.MOV, originally uploaded by metrixcreate.

My clock. It ticks.

irb> require "csvtables"
irb> t = CSV::table('employees.csv')
irb> t.first.last_name
=> "Filer"

The code:

require 'arrayfields'
require 'csv'

class CSV
	def self.table(filename, mode='r')
		open(filename, mode).to_table
	end
end

class CSV::Reader
	def to_table
		struct = Array.struct self.first.map { |v| v.downcase.gsub(/\s/, '_').to_sym }
		self.map { |row| struct.new row }
	end
end

I’ve just written a quick lua shell plugin for Lightroom, mostly to help me write other plugins, but I think it will also be an easy way to manipulate photo metadata. Writing it was pretty easy, though my one frustration was that the Lightroom plugin API does not appear to provide a way to make scrollable dialogs, so the output view will fill up and have to be cleared. The famous Lightroom plugin writer Jeffrey Friedl appears to have solved this by writing his own scrollbar widgets, so I may have to do that eventually.

To get the code/plugin (I’ve left the Lua uncompiled), head to https://github.com/afiler/luashell.lrdevplugin.

Pre-loaded extras provided in the shell environment include:

• catalog => LrApplication.activeCatalog()
• target => LrApplication.activeCatalog():getTargetPhoto()
• targets => LrApplication.activeCatalog():getTargetPhotos()

Of course, you can still call import() just as you would inside a plugin.

Note that commands that would normally need to be called asynchronously (within an LrTask) are silently wrapped, so that:
x = target:getRawMetadata(‘fileSize’)
becomes:
LrTasks.startAsyncTask(function() x = target:getRawMetadata(‘fileSize’)) end)
Note that in the result window, normal return values are prefixed by “->”, while asynchronous return values are prefixed by “=>”.

def include_class_methods(klass)
  eval <<-EOF
    class << self
      klass = eval('#{klass.name}')
      klass.singleton_methods.each do |sym|
        define_method(sym) do |*args|
          klass.send sym, *args
        end
      end
    end
  EOF
end

Note: this doesn't seem to work in Ruby 1.9, as File.singleton_methods is empty. One possible replacement for File.singleton_methods is (File.public_methods - File.public_instance_methods - File.ancestors.reject { |x| x == File }.map { |x| x.methods }.flatten). Yeesh.

It has knobs like a real radio, but yet it plays modern radio stations. There’s no screen yet, but one is coming.

I use an Arduino to connect the switches and selector knob to the computer inside, and it uses mpd (the music player daemon) to tune through a playlist of internet radio stations. Code for that is at github.com/afiler/filko.

I made this laser-cut signage for Metrix in their house style: black and red, with Eurostile as the typeface. (The hanging sign now actually says “METRIX CREATE SPACE” instead of just “EAT”).

Up next: a laser-cut moveable letter board.

Torresandino, Burgos, Castilla y León, Spain

Les Tonnins, Montigny-sur-Canne, Nièvre, France

Gonges, Ville-Langy, Nièvre, France

Range Road 3074
Langham, Saskatchewan, Canada

Carretera Federal 2
near Janos, Chihuahua, Mexico

R27 Highway, Karoo region
near Brandvlei, Northern Cape, South Africa

Frontier Outpost
Port of Willow Creek, Saskatchewan-Montana border, Canada/US

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'csv'

def main(f)
  Nokogiri::HTML.parse(open(f)).search('table').each do |t|
    t.search('tr').each do |tr|
      puts CSV.generate_line(tr.xpath('th|td').collect do |td|
        td.text
      end)
    end
    puts
  end
end

ARGV.each { |f| main(f) }

Ever wake up one morning and say “today, I’m going to design my own banknote”? Of course, we all have. But earlier this week, I decided to act on that impulse. And just last night, I printed and laser cut my first batch of bytecoins at Metrix.

For those curious how the bytecoin compares to the (unrelated) bitcoin, I offer this handy chart:

The design of the bytecoin was influenced by colorful banknotes I’d seen in the past and some of the Dollar ReDe$ign Project winners. Some of my favorite banknotes are the Dutch Guilder, specifically, the late 60s/early 70s ƒ5, ƒ10, and ƒ25, and the early 80s ƒ50:

By the way, I hear if you’re looking to buy or sell bytecoins, you may find interested parties hanging out at Metrix Create:Space (not an official exchange). I’m sure they’d gladly accept bytecoins as tips.

Connecting an Apple II keyboard to a computer with USB is surprisingly easy with a Teensy board. The Apple II uses an ASCII keyboard, which means that rather than returning scan codes, it returns a 7-bit ASCII value. This also means you can’t read the state of modifier keys like shift or control independently. The Apple II keyboard in particular doesn’t even support lower-case letters (though I’ve made a bit of a hack for this). They even re-use a couple alpha keys for other characters, so shift-P makes @ and shift-N makes ^. Other late 70s/early 80s home computers like the TRS-80 had a really simple layout like the Apple II’s (though the TRS-80 had all four arrow keys but no Control key). I may have to try out adapting some other weird old home computers as USB keyboards — the C-64 seems like it would be a good shape/size for that.

Arduino (Teensyduino) code is available at https://github.com/afiler/keyduino.

I shot this last June, in Warroad, at a gas station only a couple blocks from Lake of the Woods. Right now I’d gladly put up with mayflies to have that sort of weather back.

Since Unicode “works” in most places on the internet these days (from webpages to Twitter to IRC in terminal sessions), I like to use all the characters that are available to me, when they make sense — like “99¢” or “-40°”. I decided go to Metrix and laser many of the characters accessible from Alt(Gr) into the keycaps on my MacBook Pro. The keyboard is backlit and lasering the key exposes the clear key underneath, so it turned out quite well. If I’m feeling like there still isn’t enough visual interference on my keyboard, I may decide to laser on the AltGr and Cyrillic characters too.

Since Unicode “works” in most places on the internet these days (from webpages to Twitter to IRC in terminal sessions), I like to use all the characters that are available to me, when they make sense — like “99¢” or “-40°”. I decided go to Metrix and laser many of the characters accessible from Alt(Gr) into the keycaps on my MacBook Pro. The keyboard is backlit and lasering the key exposes the clear key underneath, so it turned out quite well. If I’m feeling like there still isn’t enough visual interference on my keyboard, I may decide to laser on the AltGr and Cyrillic characters too.

The Kronos looks like a non-cubic NeXTcube with a case designed by 1950s engineers, but it’s actually a rather unique workstation based on the Lilith (created by Niklaus Wirth, the creator of Pascal, and influenced by his time at Xerox PARC). [wikipedia] [robotranslated Russian wikipedia article, with screenshots] [photos]

pickles, originally uploaded by valkyrieh116.

Want to bundle a web page into a single file, without a _files directory, or using the not-supported-everywhere .mht (IE, Opera) or .webarchive (Safari) formats? Use pagecan! I developed pagecan so I can return converted documents on doc.mar.cx as a single file.

pagecan will take an URL of an HTML document, grab all resources referenced by “src”, and bundle the page and encoded resources into a single file, through the use of the data URI scheme. pagecan is written in Ruby and uses the Nokogiri parser (you can install the gem with gem install nokogiri, or the Debian package with sudo apt-get install libnokogiri-ruby).

Usage: pagecan url [file | -]

If ‘-’ or no file is given, output is sent to stdout. pagecan has been tested only with HTTP URLs, but as it uses Ruby open-uri, other URIs and local files may work.

pagecan on github

Namibia looks like the sort of place I’d like to photograph. My mom will be going there for a few weeks next year, so maybe she’ll be able to give me some tips.

Communist goods from the drug store

Check out this video (and other related ones in the video’s sidebar) for some great Soviet-era packaging. I’d love to find out where the images came from, but for now, this will have to do.

Duncan and I made tshirts with the “phone company” logo on them (no actual phone company has this logo, but it looks a lot like the logo of some random independent phone company in the 1970s.

They were screen printed, but with a plastic stencil instead of a photo-process “stencil”. I bought a book of polypropylene sheets from Dick Blick (“suitable for water color”, the cover says), and got the stencil cut on the laser cutter at Metrix. They can’t cut vinyl or other chlorine-containing compounds, as deadly chlorine gas will be produced (though in quantities that would probably be more damaging to the laser than to humans), but polypropylene works great.

Varia Plastilina modeling clay

http://doc.mar.cx/http://www.ieee.org/documents/IEEECopyrightForm.doc

This will give you an HTML version. If you’d like a different output type, insert that type’s extension in front of the URL. For a plain-text version instead, for example,

http://doc.mar.cx/txt/http://www.ieee.org/documents/IEEECopyrightForm.doc.

PDF, HTML, text, CSV, XLS, and DOC output formats are supported on the relevant data types. I’ll soon be adding ImageMagick support to convert from zillions of image formats, and conversions to/from .SHP shapefiles, KML files and other geodata should also be supported soon.

Want to know what input document types are supported? Just try the link. If it works, then that document type is supported. If it doesn’t work, then that document type isn’t supported.

RFT Industrial Clock

From the eBay UK auction: “Stunning large and sought after industrial clock from the East German electricals company RFT (Rundfunk- und Fernmelde-Technik). RFT was created when the Communist government seized control of all electrical manufacturers after the partition of Germany including parts of Siemens and AEG, and collectivised them into one entity. The tradition of quality carried through from AEG and other large German manufactures is evident in most of RFT’s output. This clock was made a time when the Soviet Bloc was desperate to prove to the West how modern and successful their production and consumer system was, and how advanced their technology.

Many German industrial clock designs are based upon the iconic Swiss Federal Railways clocks of the 1940′s designed by Hans Hilfiker (1901-93), featuring a simple pared down but graphically strong clock face, influenced by the teachings at the Bauhaus and the traditions of the Modernist Movement.”

More finger feature suggestions are welcome!

apt-cyg install wget links # You probably don't have apt-cyg installed,
# so grab that or just use Cygwin's setup.exe instead
# to ensure wget and links are installed
ln -s /usr/bin/links /usr/bin/lynx # Man expects lynx for html pages
mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/html9
cd /usr/local/share/man/html9
wget -O- 'http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772390(WS.10).aspx' |\
grep -Po 'ctl00_MTCS_main_ctl.+href="\K([^"]+)(:.+>)([^>]+)(?=)' index.html |\
sed -r 's/^([^"]+).+>([^>]+)$/\1 \2/' | \
while read url name
do name=`echo ${name// /-} | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`
wget -O "$name.9.html" "$url"
done

That will get you man pages for all the commands in that A-Z list. For man pages on subcommands like “net computer”, type “man net-computer”. If you look at that list you’ll notice “net computer” but no “net use” or any of the other usual commands — of course, many of the net commands are well-documented through “net help”. If you really want to be unixy, you can dump those net help pages out to the manual too. Since they’re not formatted, you’ll want to put them in the cat9 directory instead of the html9 directory, and drop the .html extensions.

mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/cat9
cd /usr/local/share/man/cat9
for cmd in `net 2>&1 | grep '|' | sed 's/^NET//;s/[^A-Z]/ /g' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'` ; do net help $cmd > net-$cmd.9 ; done


I don’t know of any comprehensive list of commands besides the A-Z list and the net commands list. But to create individual man pages, you can do something like:

wget -O sqlcmd.9.html 'http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162773(d=printer).aspx'

This will give you a man page for sqlcmd, the command-line client for SQL Server. If you wanted to grab all the man pages for the net subcommands (instead of using the results from “net help”), do

for x in accounts computer continue file group help helpmsg localgroup name pause print sendshare session start statistics stop time use user view ; do wget -O net-$x.9.html "http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/net_$x.mspx" ; done
wget -O net-config.9.html 'http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/net_config_server.mspx'

If you’re looking for a little more Ubuntu/Debianism in Windows, try Richard’s apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade for Wndows. Got any more urls for man pages? Please post a comment and share!

$ finger fakeapstylebook@twitter.com@finger.afiler.com
[finger.afiler.com]
Login: FakeAPStylebook Name: Fake AP Stylebook
Bio: Style tips for proper writing. contact: fakeapstylebook at gmail dot com. No submissions, please. All material copyright The Bureau Chiefs, LLC.
Location:
Web: http://www.thebureauchiefs.com
Apr 22 16:00: For an international audience, spell the pop star's name as "KeUSDha."
Apr 22 11:30: Do not reference The Oxford English Dictionary. We speak American.
...
Apr 16 07:00: It's "for all intents and purposes." "Intensive Purposes" is the hot new medical drama from CBS.
Apr 15 16:00: Be sure not to confuse "aural" and "oral." The former is very uncomfortable.
Apr 15 14:17: Bureau Chiefs Poll: Who would you choose to perform at your son?@Ys bar mitzvah? http://bit.ly/ds489i


I made a monitor stand out of black gas pipe and fittings, compression tees, and an adapter bracket.

The compression tees (as in pipe fittings, not clothing) were an awesome find. They have rubber gaskets inside that made a surprisingly tight connection once the end caps are screwed down.

The galvanized metal fitting is a bracket made for using metal pipes for things like mounting rails and chin-up bars. The holes are 38mm apart, as opposed to 100mm on the standard VESA mount, so I made an adapter bracket. I made the adapter out of 6mm birch on the laser cutter at Metrix Create:Space though it would be easy enough to make at home — but lasering’s just so easy! I even countersunk screw holes using the laser.

I’m really impressed with the stability of the stand. I had been worried I’d need to add clamps under the compression tees to make sure they wouldn’t slip, but it turns out they’re far more solid than expected.

If I ever go completely insane and decide I need more monitors, I’m thinking I could make an X-Y setup, with two vertical bars, on which horizontal bars could be mounted. Each row could still have its height adjusted, plus this would allow an up/down tilt on each monitor.

Total cost for this was about $70, $8 of which was for the (very optional) laser cutting.

The hexagon logo makes me think of a 1970s chemical company. Hrm… cheap cologne, chemical company? Maybe that’s not too far off.

From Jaunted || Favorite Souvenirs: Pereja Turkish Lemon Cologne.

City of Seattle(?) logo on a Metro substation, originally uploaded by afiler.

I saw this logo on the alley-side fence of a Metro electric substation on 15th in Seattle. The logo looks like the current Seattle logo, but with a green S instead of blue, and a red target in the center instead of Chief Sealth in black.

The oddball switches are the ones that really interest me, and they’ll be the first ones to disappear from the network. I’ve been told that the TRW Vidar ITS-5 and the Mitel GX5000 switches may be gone from the North American network. To see what might be left, I decided to do some digging, and I’ve come up with a list of the telephone switches (minus remotes) still in use in the North American network. There’s undoubtedly some stale data in this database, and so for rare switches, I think the numbers listed are the upper boundary — the lower boundary may be as low as 0. The list also contains the mystery “Digital Switching System”. There seems to be an awfully large number of them for it to be the North Electric DSS-1, which became the ITT 1210 — maybe it just means “unknown digital switch”?

The picture above of the GTD-5 EAX was shamelessly stolen from the site of a GTD-5 consultant, the only place I could find a picture.

Top 10 Switches

The Whole List

Older Nortel switch have some screaming 70s colors. The DMS-100 is the bigger of the two Nortel end offices, and it’s green. The DMS-10 is the smaller one, and it’s orange. My company uses DMS-10s, and we even have orange and brown Nortel touch-up paint.

I don’t know what color the DMS-200, DMS-250, or DMS-300 are, but I hope they’re equally as fabulous. I hear newer Nortel switches are grey, sadly.

Recently, Google Maps has started returning search results for townships (probably since Google’s change to being their own geodata provider). As I love tiny dots on the map and obscure entities, this got me excited. In some cases, the township name will even show up as a dot with a link to the township’s Wikipedia article. I think this only happens when the township also has a town with the same name inside it. Townships can be found by searching by whatever uniquely identifies them, e.g. Chilgren for Chilgren Township, Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota, Laona, MN for Laona Township, Roseau County, MN, or Lincoln, Marshall, MN for Lincoln Township, Marshall County, Minnesota.

The data for these features is coming from the USGS’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database. I’ve put up a unique interface that combines that database with a few others, including databases of Canadian locations, zip codes, railroad stations, and telephone switch locations, at afiler.com/dots/. Want to see the list of every named place in Washington State? Or every place in the US and Canada named Springfield? Or even every place named Springfield in Georgia? The GNIS database lists 9 Springfields in Georgia, though only one is an incorporated city. The rest are so small, most don’t even get their name on Google Maps at any zoom level.

Dots lets you dig into extremely obscure place names, and this lets me dig up other secretly searchable Google Maps place names. Townships are called minor civil divisions by the US Census and some form of MCDs exist in 28 states. MCDs have some sort of official government function (though often small) — they include urbanized areas (cities, towns, villages, boroughs), townships, New England towns, parish governing authority districts (Louisiana), magisterial districts (Virginia and West Virginia), election districts/precincts (parts of Illinois, Maryland, and Nebraska), supervisors’ districts (Mississippi), and “catch all” entities, when nothing else applies (assessment districts, gores, grants, plantations, purchases, road districts, and unorganized territories). I’m still exploring what MCDs, other than townships and cites/towns/villages are searchable in Google Maps.

The other 22 states are divided into census county divisions instead of MCDs. These were created with the cooperation of the census and the state governments and may only be used for census tabulation or may also be used by county governments, for example, as electoral districts. MCDs are also are searchable in Google Maps. That means that you can find the census division of Early Winters in Okanogan County, Washington by searching for Early Winters, Okanogan, WA (or just Early Winters, WA, or even just Early Winters).

In Canada, Google Maps uses the census division as the county is in the US. Census divisions correspond to a county or county-like entity in most provinces where those exist. This includes BC (regional districts and municipalities), Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island (counties), Ontario (upper-tier municipalities: counties, districts, regional municipalities, cities) and Quebec (municipalités régionales de comté). Elsewhere, census divisions do not correspond to local government. Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunavut, and the Northwest territories have named census divisions. Census divisions are simply numbered in Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan (even though Alberta has some entities named “County”, they’re municipal districts and are treated like the rural municipalities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan). (Early in its history, Manitoba also had counties, though the names only persist in land records and in the name of the Dennis County Planning District. I was able to find the names and locations of counties from the 1880s in Manitoba statute books on Google Books, and used that to write up a Wikipedia article, a list of historic counties in Manitoba.)

Searching for Springfield, Canada will get Google Maps to display its most-expanded name (other times they’re shortened to City, Province or City, County, Province). Results include “Springfield, Division No. 12, MB” (the RM of Springfield, a local government unit, inside a nongovernmental census division), but also “Springfield, Woodstock, Carleton County, NB”, (a named place inside Woodstock Parish in Carleton County), and “Springfield, Swift Current No. 137, Division No. 8, SK” (a named place inside a rural municipality, inside a nongovernmental census divisions). The results from Google Maps appear mostly consistent with a search for Springfield at Statistics Canada.

For even more obscure geodata info, check out the Census’s list of county subdivision types, or their maps of MCDs and CCDs, by state. There’s also an even more obscure geographic subdivision not used by the census, the hundred, in Delaware. The hundred once also existed in the UK (where some Local Government Districts took the name of a hundred), and Australia (where they’re still used in land descriptions as as one of the cadastral divisions of Australia).

From the Telegraph in the UK: “Argleton, a ‘phantom town’ in Lancashire that appears on Google Maps and online directories but doesn’t actually exist, has puzzled internet experts.” The photo is from Picasa user Mister Roy, who walked and photographed the nonexistent place in February 2009.

I’ve seen hundreds of Argletons in North Dakota. Of course, the difference is that North Dakota’s Argletons usually had, at some point in the past, a bit more concrete existence — though not necessarily that much more. Some of the places I photographed were ever only a railroad siding or post office. If they were big enough to end up on USGS topological maps in the 1970s, they’ve now secured a permanent digital existence thanks to the place name database distributed by the US Board on Geographic Names.

Dundas, North Dakota

These are my grandparents. They went on vacation to the USSR in 1982. I have to assume the two men in hats to the left are KGB spies. Presumably the closer one is going for the young, hip look. I think the blue jacket my grandpa is wearing was bought at GUM.

There’s a whole reel of slides, some of which I’ve got scanned and on flickr. I’ve also digitized a recording of my grandpa narrating the slides. Once I’ve got all the images, I’ll try to sync up the slides and the audio.

Winnipeg, like Seattle, has a plan for a subway that was never built. In 1959 the designer of the Toronto subway submitted a plan recommending the construction of a subway (over elevated rail, “mono-rail”, rubber-tired subway, or commuter rail).

Future Development of the Greater Winnipeg Transit System by Norman D. Wilson, 1959

Transit Rider’s Union of Winnipeg maps of the subway on modern (2009) maps

These pictures on flickr by Niquinho make me want to visit Patagonia — 73km over a gravel road, it’s like a metric version of Montana!

Palette and pattern by sugar! at COLOURlovers.com, swatch image by purplelemondesigns.com.

South Minneapolis neighborhoods

Google Maps always seems to be changing, often for the better. I’m not sure exactly when this changed, but today I noticed that the 81 official neighborhoods of Minneapolis now had their names on the map. Checking the Google Map for Seattle, I see that the (not officially “official”) 106 city clerk-designated neighborhood names are on there as well. Official neighborhood names, like townships (cf. Missing Municipalities), are often not the first thing that comes to mind when someone describes where they live. Technically, I have lived in Excel Township and St. Anthony East, but I was more likely to say “Thief River Falls” (or “Holt”) and “Northeast Minneapolis”. But now, it’s easy for someone to see they live in St. Anthony East, so why not get a little more local?

For informal names, I like Capitol Hill Seattle’s sociogeographic approach (including the neighborhood “watering hole”, for example). While I might not expect those names to show up on Google Maps, I do appreciate that Google hasn’t removed widely-used neighborhood names. The center of Uptown in Minneapolis, for example, is actually the intersection of the East Calhoun, CARAG, Lowry Hill East, and East Isles neighborhoods. Neighborhood neologisms like Madison Heights don’t make Google Maps either, but for those wondering what they should call their neighborhood other than “15th” or “19th” or something, Google Maps reminds them that, as far as the city is concerned, it’s Stephens.

CBC Butterfly Logo, 1966.

Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad timetable, from Wikimedia Commons.

From mistercola on eBay.

Click the image for a larger version or view an even bigger version.

More Clicquot Club…

Ampol road map for New South Wales, 1961. Ampol is Australian Owned.

From Jon Roma’s road maps collection.

Capitol Hill, Metro system map

I’ve traveled recently through cities with real rapid transit systems and have been reminded of just how easy it becomes to form a mental map of a city based on its transit map. My neighborhood in Seattle is served by a network bus routes that come every 10-15 minutes most times of day, so one can just wait at a stop without worrying too much about bus schedules. The bus isn’t as fast as a subway train, but the buses come almost as frequent. Looking at Metro’s map, however, it’s hard to form the same sort of mental map, as frequent buses are mixed with infrequent ones and unfamiliar routes are hard to follow visually. The map also makes it far from obvious that the 11 becomes the 125 and provides a single-seat ride from Capitol Hill to West Seattle.

Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Metro Transit helps highlight the more rapid aspects of the bus/light rail system there with the Hi-Frequency Network signage and map. I like the easy visualization of the high-frequency system (and the hi-frequency highlights on the main map), but I wanted to start local. The blog Capitol Hill Seattle provides a very local bus map, showing detail that can’t be found in the Metro system map. I’ve created a map somewhere in between a detailed local map and a systemwide map like the Hi-Frequency map or a subway map, and I call it the Octopus Map.

Capitol Hill Octopus Map

The Capitol Hill Octopus Map shows the major routes from the neighborhood to downtown, the U District, Central District, Queen Anne, and other neighborhoods. The extended version of the map includes more routes on the Central District side of things, as well as less-traveled routes like the 9 and the southeastern section of the 8. On either map, you’ll note that you don’t see every intersecting route nor every kink along the line. For detail down to the block level, go to Metro’s map for that particular route, or look for the bus stop location on Google Maps. For a broader overview, and to help form a vivid mental bus map for the neighborhood, try the Octopus Map.

For more on transit maps, and why a diagrammatic map can be such a good thing, check out the excellent Transit Maps of the World. It includes the Kick Map, seen below, which is my favorite NYC subway map. It’s less strictly diagrammatic than the Massimo Vignelli map, and more diagrammatic than the very geographic MTA map.

Kick Map, Midtown Manhattan

Extended Capitol Hill Octopus Map

Minneapolis Hi-Frequency Map

photo by Alan Loftis on MichiganRailroads.com.

photo by J/G on flickr.

photo by Enrico Webers on flickr.

photo by Patrick Rasenberg on flickr.

• The house in Ambrose
• Petrel, which consists of a sign
• De Sart, a spot in a field, with an abandoned house not far away

I’ve spent hours driving to nearly unfindable places, like Three V Crossing, which somehow merits inclusion on the DeLorme map of North Dakota. Google Maps and MSN Maps both know where it is, but only MSN Maps actually bothers to give it a dot on the map.

The DeLorme North Dakota Atlas has become my official standard for defining “every dot on the North Dakota map”. If it’s on there, I will photograph it. The MSN maps are somehow even more detailed, but I don’t feel too bad about neglecting to photograph a place that’s too small for DeLorme or Google Maps. If I were feeling particularly meticulous, I’d also include data from my SPV railroad atlas. That, however, would probably double the time it would take me to finish this state. When finding all these tiny dots on maps, I’d originally assumed that they all came from the USGS place name database. What I’ve found, however, is that there doesn’t seem to be some master set — USGS might not have a place that MSN does, or vice-versa. Therefore, I get to look at five different places (DeLorme, Google Maps, MSN Maps, SPV railroad atlas, and the USGS database) if I really want to find every single dot.

Missing municipalities. Checking my map near Beach, North Dakota, I noticed that the usually 6-mile-square civil townships that blanket much of the Midwest and Ontario were larger than usual, ten to twelve miles square. Then I noticed that some counties appeared to be missing townships altogether. It made me wonder just how relevant the township is in an area with a rural population density of 0.8 people per square mile. As it turns out, many townships in North Dakota have disappeared. The US Census Population Estimates Boundary Changes reports dissolution of six township governments and one city from 2000-2006. Five cities and thirteen townships were dissolved in the 1990s.

Now today, I find out that the county I’m photographing in is experimenting with ‘voting centers’ for today’s primary election. Instead of voting in small town(ship) halls, people vote in the larger city or cities in the county. It appears that one of the last visible functions of townships may be disappearing in North Dakota. In some ways, this makes sense, since these buildings are small, often quite cold on the first Tuesday in November, and an expense to repair. On the other hand, driving 60 miles round-trip sounds a lot less appealing with $4/gallon gas.

Unincorporated dots. Nearly any dot on the map with more than a couple streets is an incorporated municipality, called a “city” by the state, regardless of size. I started wondering just how big a place could be and not be incorporated. One of the larger and better-maintained unincorporated communities is New Hradec. The town has a Catholic church, a Catholic school, and a Catholic workmen’s hall. It seems as though a large Catholic church ends up drawing enough people in to keep a tiny place surviving, as is also the case in Fried and Leo.

Electric Green. After photographing the store above, I turned right onto MLK Way (a day before the holiday, incidentally), and followed the street for awhile, looking at the progress of the light rail line (looks mostly done here). Near the Henderson Street station, I noticed a strip of green curling up into the hills. I could see an asphalt bike path weaving its way through the green, so I decided to pull over and go for a walk. As it turns out, this is a strip of land underneath a Seattle City Light transmission line, called Chief Sealth Trail. I followed about 2.5 miles of the line, first southeast, where I stopped at the Creston-Nelson Substation (complete with an electrical plug safety sculpture). I then followed it back northwest, past MLK Way, up to near Holly Park, and back to my car (for what turns out to be about a 5-mile round trip). It was really a great sight in the setting sun, especially with Rainier set beautifully against the pylons.

Moccasin, Montana is the closest to a ghost town that I’ve ever seen. It’s not completely deserted, but it’s close. There’s still a post office and grain elevator, but that’s about it.

Trainspotting? Though I’m many forms of geek, railfan isn’t one of them. Then why would I pick up SPV’s Comprehensive Railroad Atlas – Dakotas & Minnesota? I picked it up because most Everydots that I’ve photographed were built along rail lines, and some of the tiniest dots only have signage thanks to the railroad. The SPV atlas shows current and former rail lines, and current and former stations and sidings. Since the existence of many of these tiny towns was defined by the railroads, these maps end up being pretty comprehensive. It also helps explain why some maps would list some of these basically nonexistent spots and others would list different ones — the data for those must have come from railroad maps. For me, this means that if I want to be comprehensive, I now have even more dots to visit. While I expect that most of them will have nearly nothing that indicates they were a town, sometimes finding the smallest piece of evidence that they existed feels like a great discovery.

I like the graphic design in the ad, though I’m not familiar enough with design of the time to know how 1933-ish it really is. The bottle has an engraved look that I associate with catalogs of the time period, and is similar to the Hedcut style used at the Wall Street Journal since 1979. I love the scallops, though they make me think more of the 1970s than the 1920s and 30s. The Gay Nineties seemed to be a popular theme in the 70s (think Phineas Q. Butterfat’s), and the red scallops make me think of the red-striped gay nineties vest.

Now, is this ad “authentic”? Since I don’t see this ad being passed off as something that was created at the end of prohibition, I’d have to say that it’s authentic — it’s an image created in 2007 using the techniques available at the time. I think we may have an unhealthy obsession with authenticity at times. I don’t accuse 1950′s retro design, a favorite disfavorite of mine, of being inauthentic; it is its own genre, a generally cheap pastiche of design from an era with incredibly sophisticated design. But is this ad indistinguishable from something that would have been printed in 1933? I’m sure there are details, stylistic choices, or other subtleties that could disprove that. To my eye, however, it’s well done enough that there are no distractingly out-of-place details, and regardless of is perceived authenticity, it’s just a fun ad.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Goodridge (Minnesota) Historical Society yesterday, and I came across this beautiful butter box. Daisies are quite popular imagery with dairy products, especially butter. My favorite is a packaging company’s sample imagery for “Best Butter” (not a real product). Now, I’m sure the Goodridge butter packaging wasn’t made specifically for that creamery. It looks like the brand name would have just been stamped in the happy puffy cloud near the daisies. Still, I love seeing that small enterprises could actually have things that had good design, and it’s nice to see any sort of product that came from such a small town.

Petrel, North Dakota

Everydot: North Dakota. Earlier this summer, I drove to and from Minnesota. The route passes through North Dakota, of course, and so I had to work on my project of photographing every town in that state. I spent a solid day photographing dots on a diagonal path from Marmarth, North Dakota to Lemmon, South Dakota and North Lemmon, North Dakota. The most challenging dot to photograph was Petrel, North Dakota, which I reached by driving along US 12 in South Dakota, taking a gravel road back into North Dakota, and then walking half mile along a grassy path.

The next day turned out rainy, so I headed in the direction of home. On my eastward trip, I’d really hoped to find some big old brick hotel in some downtown where I could get a cheap room with a bathroom down the hall. I knew such a thing had once existed and figured it might still. I saw a brick hotel in Lewistown, Montana, but I didn’t feel much like quitting for the day when it was only 2pm. In Sand Springs, I saw a billboard for the Northern Hotel in Winnett, 44 miles in the opposite direction. I ended up driving to Miles City, since I new there was a big old hotel there, the Olive Hotel. I went to the counter and was delighted to find that they still had rooms available. I was less delighted when I discovered I’d be staying in the Olive Motel across the street.

On the way back to Seattle, I passed up an old wooden hotel in Scobey and passed by an old brick hotel in Plentywood that I only now discovered existed. Instead, I ended up a hundred miles down the road in a smoking room an icky 1980s hotel. The next night, however, I ended up at the Ryan Hotel in Wallace, Idaho, purely by chance. It was exactly what I was looking for, and was unrenovated except for the added convenience of a toilet and shower in the room (in place of the next room over’s giant closet perhaps?).

Everydot: Douglas County, Washington. This past weekend, I drove across the Cascades into eastern Washington. I exited I-90 at George, Washington and drove northward. I was again on a search for old brick hotels, and this time I vowed to stop and get a room no matter how early in the day. Early in the evening I hit Waterville and came upon the striking Waterville Hotel. I met Dave and Amy, who run the place, and Dave gave me a tour of the place and directions to Alstown. On the way there, I passed a very dry cemetery surrounded by miles of stubbly fields. The next day, I photographed almost every town in Douglas County. I returned to the Waterville where I sat out on the porch, recalled the day’s adventures, and had some wine and cheese (all of which was a nice change from sitting on a smoky motel bed and eating a microwaved sandwich).

Crushed Orange Crush

Another Secret Crush. Back in April I discovered a 20+ year old Orange Crush bottle inexplicably sitting in a flower box. This weekend, while looking to see if anything remained of Matthiesen, Washington, I found an old garbage dump. Whoever was dumping their garbage there was a fan of orange soda, and in particular, Orange Crush. I had to grab a fairly well-preserved Crush can just because it was such an odd occurrence.

Geodata. On my Douglas County trip, I brought along my old Garmin eTrex Legend handheld GPS unit. I hadn’t done anything with geotagging before, but I figured I’d haul the unit around and see if I could get anything out of it later. Before I left I went to the tracklog menu and saved what was already there, hoping that I might be able to get geodata from past trips where the GPS rode around in my car. A few days after I got back, I decided to pull off the tracklogs. What I ended up with was about 2/3 of my most recent trip timestamped and ready to be synced with my photos, plus the trips I saved (from 2003, as it turns out) sans timestamps. Rather counterintuitively, saving the tracklogs on this unit preserves some data while destroying others.

The timestamped tracklogs got synced perfectly thanks to gpsPhoto.pl. Since I’d already uploaded the photos to Flickr, I synced those separately, with GPSTagr. This was great, because I ended up with all the photos I took on a map.

Now I wanted to do this for the other 6000+ Everydot photos I’d taken. I figured I’d be able to get geodata for them by connecting the tags I’d put on them with a place name database and adding that via the Flickr API. I downloaded the database from the USGS’s Geographic Names Information Service. For places in Canada, I used Natural Resources Canada’s Geographical Name Search Service. All this was glued together with a Ruby script, and before long, nearly all of my 430 or so Everydots were geotagged.

NE 18th Ave rail corridor, Minneapolis

On a long walk through Seattle with my friend Max Action, Max pointed out to me distinctive markers of tunnels, from purple glass sidewalk-windows to giant grates. To him, I couldn’t help but point out vestiges of long-dead businesses painted, carved, and built into buildings.

On my walk home, while listening to Evan Doorbell narrate a phone trip, I noticed curved lines in the sidewalk concrete, and changes in the material of the curb. As I looked, I could see that the business on this block had changed over time, and driveway/alley cutouts had been added and removed. This is a tiny, tiny thing, but as we walk over ground (literally or figuratively) hundreds and hundreds of times, we start to recognize patterns, whether it’s conscious or not.

Max has an excellent ability to recognize subterranean patterns from above; similarly, Evan Doorbell can hear the smallest click, thunk, or ka-chunk in the old analog phone system and know just what it is. For me, once I saw how these old urban commercial nodes mapped so directly to the Minneapolis streetcar system, I couldn’t stop seeing urban design patterns that persisted 50 years after the end of the streetcars.

Seattle Subways. The Seattle Monorail Project was far from the first abandoned transit plan for the city. Seattle had interurban and electric streetcars over a century ago, but by 1926, there was a desire for real rapid transit, like in Chicago or New York. By 1928, there was a comprehensive proposal that included station drawings, route maps, projected traffic graphs and numbers, and lots of stuff you’d see in modern transit planning.


Read more…

Anydot? Everydot. A very nice spread of my photos can be found in the mnartists.org supplement to the Rake magazine this month. Unfortunately, the issue cover and index both identify my project as Anydot, instead of Everydot. Hopefully those googling for me might find this post if they search for “anydot“.

August 16, 1926.

At the regular monthly meeting of the Seattle City Planning Commission, held August 10, 1926, the following motion was carried unanimously:

That the report and findings of the Rapid Transit Committee be adopted and transmitted to the City Council with the following recommendations.

1st. That the City council of the City of Seattle should at once proceed to the end that adequate rapid transit facilities shall be provided the citizens at as early date as possible.

2d. Adequate rapid transit facilities for the immediate future can be attained, with reasonable and practicable financial accomplishment of construction and operation, as shown in the report hereto attached.

Respectfully submitted,
CITY PLANNING COMMISSION,
By
B. S. GOODWIN,
President

CHAS. H. ALDEN,
Secretary

By 1928, there was a comprehensive proposal that included station drawings, route maps, projected traffic graphs and numbers, and lots of stuff you’d see in modern transit planning. More info on the 1926-1928 “Trimble plan”:

• The proposed lines on Google Maps
• Original University/Westlake map
• Original Downtown/South Lake Union map
• Subway station drawing
• Subway station/tunnel cross-section

In 1957, planning for I-5 was underway and a engineer M. O. Anderberg authored a plan to run rapid transit via I-5 from Tacoma to Everett, with a tunnel through downtown. North of downtown it would have ran on the lower deck of I-5 with the express lanes. In other sections, it would have run in the median, similar to Chicago’s Blue Line. See the 1957 plan on Google Maps for route and station details.

In 1967, the newly formed Metro (Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle) put forth a transit plan that’s probably an ancestor of the light-rail now under construction. By 1985, the plan envisioned a rail transit line through downtown, Queen Anne, Magnoila/Interbay, Ballard, and Greenwood, another line from downtown through Capitol Hill to the U District, with a potential extension to Bothell, another line through Beacon Hill and Mercer Island to Bellevue, with potential extension to Redmond, another line through Rainier Valley to Tukwila and Renton, with potential connection to the Bellevue segment, and potential spur to West Seattle. Needless to say, the Metro plan 20 years after 1985 is significantly less ambitious. Check out the 1967 plan on Google Maps.

In 1979, there was a modest proposal to extend the monorail by adding a loop around Seattle Center, connecting the monorail to the edge of Queen Anne, and adding a stop in Belltown.

In 1997, Initiative 41 proposed a 40-mile two-line monorail, criscrossing the city. That led to the more modest Green Line, which, while closer than most of the other plans, never saw the light of day. Check out the Green Line on Google Maps.

Finally, I find that the more I dig, the more plans I find. I’ve seen references to a plan from 1920, Historylink reports a 1910 monorail plan, plus there have been various intermediate and scaled-back plans from Metro (like the Northwest Corridor plan) and others, and more informal plans and even a student thesis on the subject.

I’m In Print! I was recently featured in the mnartists.org newsletter. That same feature will be partially reproduced in the mnartists quarterly arts supplement in The Rake, which hits the street April 30. There may be some more publicity coming in the near future, but I’ll hold off on that until I have a firm date for things.

New Site. I’ve started a new site, using a name I’ve held for awhile, oddmart.com. I have a few notes on books: the How to Show Telephone Numbers On Letterheads booklet by Ladislav Sutnar and Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City, as well as a couple that originally appeared this site. On oddmart I’ll also be selling some of the import-only graphic design books, as well as some reprints of out-of-copyright design books.

This booklet contains some new contemporary letterhead designs for business and personal stationery. / A variety of ways to display telephone numbers consistent with attractive design is shown. / For maximum usefulness and clarity always show all 10 numerals of the number [include the Area Code]. / The Area Code may be identified by using the words “Area Code” and separated from the local number by extra space, as shown in this book. Or, if space is limited, the Area Code may be identified by setting it in parentheses. / It may be appropriate to use the word “telephone” to distinguish the telephone number from other numbers on the letterhead. / Place the letters “TWX” before the ten-digit teletypewriter number.

Check out my scan of the booklet.

Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, is a remarkably well-preserved example of Modernist architecture. A colony of Italy from 1890 to 1941, Eritrea and its capital city were built up during the Fascist era as a base for greater colonization in Africa. Since World War II, Eritrea has struggled for independence (it was part of Ethopia from 1961 to 1991), leaving Asmara pickled in the brine of decades of conflict. Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City shows a beautifully preserved and remarkably peaceful city, and details some of the city planning and unbuilt architecture during Mussolini’s reign.

Haferflocken.

Soviet-era Design Books. I love the book SED: Stunning Eastern Design and its miniature half-clone DDR Design, and now I’ve discovered a newer, bigger book on DDR (East German) design, called DDR Design (unrelated to the other DDR Design above), by Günter Höhne (English-language info here). It’s in German only, but lots of large color pictures make it a great piece of extant design porn nonetheless. In the same series as DDR Design, but by different authors are DDR Kochbuch (DDR Cookbook), DDR Backbuch (DDR Baking Book), and DDR Getränkebuch (DDR Drink Book). They’re in German only, and more text-heavy, but design freaks, and English-speakers who care to translate recipes to attain some weak sense of Ostalgia might still get from them some enjoyment.

Take Gastrin.

Everlasting Inventory. Not just a good synonym for Extant Design, Everlasting Inventory / Permanentny Remanent, is a book on “promotional graphic design in the Polish People’s Republic” that I’m anxiously awaiting. My credit card has been charged 123.99 złoty, and I think an email may have told me that my order has shipped. In the same series is Not Only the Poster / Nie Tylko Plakat, on “promotional graphic design in Poland between the wars”. The website Reklamowy oldschool shows a number of “oldschool” Polish ads. I’d like to find more postwar graphic design from other trans-Iron Curtain states, but the closest I’ve otherwise found is the pre-WWII-era Obraztsy graficheskogo dizaina / Образцы графического дизайна (Graphic Design Samples), from Russia.

Downtown Cow Town. Melvin, Minnesota has sidewalks, which is rare for a Dot this small on the map. What’s even more rare is that it also has curbs. Unfortunately, anyone trying to walk on the sidewalks is met with 25,000 volts, since this part of town is now a cow pasture.

More Dots. This day, I visited Melvin, Greenview, Beltrami, Hadler, Anthony, Heiberg, Flaming, and Sundal. Greenview was identified only by business (once a grain elevator?) alongside the railroad. Flaming seemed to be nearly nonexistent and was only on one of my two maps. A different map used in 2005 made me conclude that Sundal was also nonexistent, but I revisited it and found I’d been in the wrong spot. Sundal, near Rindal, does exist, in the form of a church and an abandoned creamery.

The Como-Harriet museum line ends at Linden Hills Blvd, near Lake Harriet. From there, the only evidence of a streetcar line is a gently curving path of oddly placed alleyways and greenspace. I followed this pathway to France Ave and the streetcar suburb of Morningside, which merged with Edina in 1966.

See More…

November. It’s that time of year again, when the clocks change and suddenly at 3pm western faces are burning orange and by 5pm all the skies scream shades of blue. It’s like a condensed summertime experience, in the space of a few hours, every day. It lasts for a couple weeks and then something changes. The sunsets get short and meaningless and they lose the stretch of illuminated blue skies.

It was a brilliantly sunny day here, and brilliantly short. I couldn’t believe I was seeing the orange of a 9pm summer sunset at 3pm. Lucky for me, I happened to go out when I did. 5:30, facing west, on October 31 will give you an amazing gradient. Barely visible at the horizon is the last orange fringe, and yet the top of the sky shows nothing of a sunset at all.

I first noticed a couple years ago that these beautiful sunsets occured around the first couple weeks in November. This particular photo is from about November 3, 2004.

Tea? On a rare sunny Seattle afternoon, I snapped this. It’s a Lipton sign with the same sort of lettering as for Salada tea in Gardenton, Manitoba. I remember “Salada” being on the windows of a northern Michigan gas station in a John Bellairs book. Thanks to Amazon, I’m reminded that it was Gert Bigger’s store: “Bigger’s Grocery Store was surrounded on three sides by a dark forest of pines. The store was just a white frame house with a plate glass window in the front. Through the window you could see rows of stacked groceries and a cash register and counter in the rear. Some green letters on the window had once spelled SALADA, but now they just said ADA.” Apparently remembering the smallest details from a book one read at age twelve is no obstacle to finding a complete reference within seconds.

Hellenic, Wild Soon to be covered by Seattle condos, a jumbled mess of Hellenic Wide painted on brick.

Something to Drink. I shot some more soda signs to slurp on. It’s always fun to find ones that have loomed over you and you’ve never noticed, like the Sprite sign below. The Diet-Rite is on a bench in front of the Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis. I’d been meaning to get that one for a long time, and when I finally did, I discovered that Williams Food & Video (which was later to reveal Orange Crush on one side and Cliquot Club on the other side is now the Clicquot Club Cafe. I actually spotted the Dad’s below on a Star Tribune article on the impending sale of Joseph’s Market in west St Paul. Finally, there’s Royal Crown Cola sign at the “Public Food Market”. That’s not THE market in Seattle, mind you, just a corner store
apparently closed but not yet emptied of goods. Peer through the windows in the next feature below.

Public Food. From what I can tell, this little corner store (the Public Food Market, see the sign immediately above) was closed. I checked it for a few days and there seemed to be no change, yet there was still food sitting on the shelves. Press your face up to the glass and see what you can see.

Ostpaket.
After a long and grueling trip through Deutsche Post and DHL (which are not yet, unfortunately, a completely merged organization), my Ostpaket has arrived. The Westpaket was a care package sent from the West to East, before the fall of the Berlin wall. Even though the miracles of capitalism and western brands have returned to eastern Germany, some DDR brands are still alive and well. This is useful for those with Ostalgie or for people like myself who just enjoy outdated graphic design. This Weizenin cake flour has some of the best examples of Extant Design: it’s rather simple design, sparse text, a product image, and a flat color background. The blue-on-white seems to be quite popular in extant design. See, especially, Marshmallow Fluff and Jiffy Mix.

Stapling Accident.

Ouch.

Happy Halloween. Heavy-duty staple + super glue + (corn syrup + flour + corn starch + red food coloring) = bloody fun.

Extant Delicacies. From the shores beyond the continental US, I bring you three new pieces of Extant Design. In a gourmet grocery in the Pike Place Market, I found Celles sur Belle butter. In a Hispanic market also in the Market, I found Goya Flan. And from a British import shop somewhere in downtown-Seattle-office-complex-ville, it’s Tunnock’s Tea Cakes.

Outdated Label Design from
the Reunified Germany
(ca. 2003)

DDR-era Soda

Extant DDR. The particular circumstances of the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany) meant little focus on marketing and little attention on design. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, some of this design began to be recognized. The show Design in der DDR in Stuttgart in 1988 was perhaps the first recognition of extant design. Taschen puts out two books (with nearly the same content) of some of these Wall-era products: the smaller but newer DDR Design and the larger SED: Stunning Eastern Design. If you’re looking for more instant DDR gratification, the website DDR Alltagskultur (Everyday DDR Culture) provides images for an amazingly wide (and still growing) list of East German products. The site is in German, but language skills are not necessary to enjoy the design, just scroll down in the lefthand frame. Language skills may be needed to enjoy all of the books on their Buchtip(p)s pages. I plan on purchasing one or two in the hopes that they’ll include plenty of color pictures. Finally, a key to the images: on the left is the East German Club-Cola (now available again [de] for those with Ostalgie). On the right is the modern (but still very Extant) Pepsi Schwip Schwap[de] (a German cola/orange drink, not unlike OK Soda). Poor Schwip Schwap seems to be heavily outmarketed [de] by Coca-Cola’s Mezzo Mix [de].

1957

2000

The Legacy of a Label.The image on the left is a Durkee’s Mayonnaise label in 1957. The image on the right is a Durkee’s Mayonnaise label in Japan in 2000. As you can see, very little has changed in 43 years. There are so many things to love about that label, Extant Design-wise, from the plain white space to the very odd font to the gold foil with blue grid label. The label on the right is courtesy Sue’s Mayomania (in Japanese, but once again, you can enjoy pictures even without the language — you will, however, have to click randomly). While Durkee’s Mayonnaise has long since disappeared from the US market, it was still being made for export to Japan. Sadly, the Durkee’s brand seems to have disappeared and has been replaced with Lightship instead.

Chicago.
This weekend, I visited Chicago. I hadn’t really intended to take pictures, but after seeing this sign for a second time, I knew I had to stop and pick up a disposable camera. (The first time I saw it, if I remember correctly, was on this crazy kidnap cab ride we were on.) After Chicago, I took the train to Ann Arbor, Michigan to visit the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor is mostly too pretty to be anything I’d want to take pictures of, though I found a few things to shoot.

Dots.
Before leaving Minnesota, I went a couple Everydot trips. True to my style, I’m posting it about three months later. I finally took pictures of the crazy little town I’m in by far the most, Karlstad (home of my employer). I also shot in a number of North Dakota towns, some of which I’d been to before. I’m trying to replace some of the bug-splattered windshield shots with much more calm, careful, and contemplative ones. By far my favorite town to shoot was also one of the largest dots, Devils Lake.

Road Closed.
Not far from the city of Devils Lake, the lake Devils Lake is rising, flooding miles and miles of land. In one area I drove through, the main road has been continually raised to stay above the water, while side roads have not. Roads lead off away from the highway and straight into the lake. In some places, the only way to see a road was once there is by the perfectly straight lines of weeds that lead off to higher land. In the distance, you can see old farmhouses once on hills are now islands in the ever-expanding lake. In one place, a pickup truck sits at the new end of a road, waiting for water to go back down so it can finally cross.

Packaging.
I’ve slaved over a hot scanner for *you*. Check out old product packaging from the 50s and 60s, including some background on the classic Extant packaging, Jiffy (then|now). Also included is some sample packaging (no such product actually existed) for a daisy-themed muttarbargerine, a bit like the Nucoa below.

Seattle Sign Slides.
On August 14th, I shot some of the signs of Seattle on a roll of Kodachrome. The film was sent to the last Kodachrome processing center in the world, in Dalandzadgad, Outer Mongolia. They tell me the film makes a torturous trek by bus, mule, and bicycle to a little photomat in a mud hut on the edge of this Gobi Desert town. OK, maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but from what I understand, Kodachrome processing is only done by a few places, one in Kansas and one in Switzerland. I was under the impression that Fuji sent film to Kansas and Kodak to Switzerland. I used Kodak, but it hardly seems like it took long enough to go to Switzerland and back.
I shot on two Seattle streets, Lake City Way and Ranier Ave. Lake City Way had a definite ‘highway town’ sort of feel and Ranier was more of an aging urban neighborhood, but both had some nice signage of similar vintage.

Plus de margarine.
At a grocery store in Greenwood, I found yet another example of Extant Design, and, quelle surprise, it’s a margarbutterine. I’m amazed at how one particular foodstuff can defy design updates for so long. Are people fiercely loyal to their margarine/butter that no amount of flashy packing could lure them away? Are people such disengaged butter/margarine consumers that they just grab the closest thing on the shelf? Has anyone on the entire planet besides me noticed this? If so, do they care?

Dot Dot Dot Dot Camera!
I visited five Washington towns yesterday: Aberdeen, Hoquiam, Pe Ell, Chehalis, and Centralia. In downtown Aberdeen, I picked up four cameras at a place called Clevengers. It’s sort of like a used department store — quite huge, and full of lots of random things, including a ton of cameras. I grabbed a Polaroid 450 (an excellent amateur Polaroid packfilm camera), an Ansco Cadet II (a 127 format camera), a Kodak Pony 828 (an 828 format camera), and the superbizarro Traid Fotron II (also 828, but in a proprietary cartridge that was to be developed by the manufacturer). I created a Wikipedia entry for the 828 film, as it was not yet represented. I also plan on making an entry for the Fotron, because its weirdness must not be left undocumented.

Soda Soda Soda Soda Soda Fizz!
This weekend and last I made some nice additions to my strange obsessive Soda Signs series. One grocery store in Seattle managed to provide me with three different signs, as well as some old Coca-Coca metal medallion thingys.
In Pe Ell, I found yet another variety (albeit rather boring) of
7-Up signs, strengthening my opinion that 7-Up signs are the most diverse.

Pepsi, Chehalis, WA

7-Up, Pe Ell, WA

Dr Pepper, Lakeland, WA

Dr Pepper, Lake City Way, Seattle

Orange Crush, Lake City Way, Seattle

Coca-Cola, Lake City Way, Seattle

Cemeterial.
About a year ago (9 October 2004 to be exact) I took some photos of two cemeteries near Mavie, MN. It was a bright, sunny, and very windy October
day. It was pretty hot out for October, actually, close to 80 I think.
I drove to the first cemetery and it was near a church, right on the
edge of a field. There were no trees around, so it was incredibly
bright. The grass had pretty well died, and the fields were golden
with dried plants. It’s a hot bright windy
day, and all I can see for miles around are the yellow and orange of
grasses and tree leaves. I took some photos of the headstones and
things. It was about as un-scary as a cemetery could get. The second
cemetery, the Germantown Cemetery, was out in a field as well, but this one was surrounded by trees. The grass in it was still green, and there was a lot of shade
from surrounding oak trees. There was no church near this cemetery –
a marker told that it had been torn down. A farmer was plowing or
something in the field nearby and either didn’t notice me or more
likely just didn’t care that I was there.
Nearly a year later, I finally looked at the photos. I picked a few of them out and have posted them in a section called Cemeterial.

This is a beautiful hardbound volume (buy! buy! buy!) of 42 of my photographs. The book is called Sunsets because there are no sunsets anywhere in it. Actually, I have my back turned to the sunset in nearly every photo — in other words, you see the long shadows and orangeness of the setting sun throughout the book. The book isn’t directly related to Everydot, but it does contain photos from a few little towns that I visited to take pictures for Everydot. The design of the book is based on The English Sunrise. That book is all of photos of the sunset motif everywhere in England, and it consists solely of photos and an index in the back — its design was also what Walker Evans wanted to base a Polaroid book of the alphabet on.

So, if you’d like a copy (buy!) I have plenty to sell. If you want one, you can email me. And yes, I can take credit cards (buy! buy!) via PayPal.

Booklet. Additionally, in my dead-end bureaucratic job at the Municipal Water Board I’ve produced a small handbook called the Municipal Water Board’s Infrastructure Handbook #1: Township Road Signs. (Note to those not familiar: the Muncipal Water Board is only as real as the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, Symbionia, or Plain Layne.) I expect the Municipal Water Board will be producing a number of books in the Infrastructure Handbook series. Each book contains snippets of some obscure and incredibly dull thing — this one is all about township road signs. Township road signs, while dull, are still far more exciting and varied than regular county road signs. Expect future topics to be one or more of the following: telephone pedestals, telephone booths, burglar alarms, typefaces, or manhole covers. Manhole covers, while an especially MuniWaBo-worthy subject, have already been done quite well in the book Manhole Covers by Mimi and Robert Melnick.

Physics. University science labs tend to collect ancient relics. That’s as true for the people as it is for the equipment. I went through Hagen Hall at Minnesota State University Moorhead looking for some non-human relics. A lot of the old equipment has typefaces that haven’t been popular in decades. Some of the equipment and boxes of stuff have a very dull, sterile, dated look, while other stuff, such as the building itself, have a very bright and colorful look. The result is an odd confluence of styles, mostly this very bright 1950s/1960s look combined with the dull grey industrial look which could in some cases be the 1930s as much as it could be the 1970s. Take a look.

Dots. I’ve posted 33 new Minnesota towns and 12 new North Dakota towns to Everydot. That brings the total to 183 for Minnesota, 73 for North Dakota, plus 16 in Manitoba, and 8 in Ontario. Check out the North Dakota ones (see the links to the right) for photos shot in the late orange evening, my favorite time of day.

Bacon. Finally, I’ve also begun to accumulate photos of modern household products with particularly interesting examples of particularly outdated graphic design in a section called Extant Design. You might ask why I’m doing this (of course, if you’re still asking questions like that, you probably haven’t looked at most of my other stuff). On a simplistic level, it’s just because these products are little time capsules, showing earlier (and usually simpler) graphic design. I also like to examine trends in design, just as the Ball and Swoosh design was popular during the dot-com days. That design wasn’t particularly graphically complex, and it was easily copied — that meant that you didn’t have to be a particularly good graphic designer to have a design that looked modern. I think the same is true for some of these products; their designers weren’t particularly avant-garde or really even unique. But because of this, they’re easily identified as dated. I think that good design can never really look dated. Real “classic” package design can be seen at the online American Package Museum and cheap, trendy, and/or sloppy package design still available can be seen here at Extant Design.

Lots more stuff is coming soon, including Everydot updates, strange outdated design, and more — but not tonight.

I also have a new Groceterial sort of section called, unsurprisingly, Groceries. Here you can see glimpses a land where Cheez Whiz comes in something smaller than a #10 steel can and there is no olive bar, sushi, or soymilk.