Tag Archives: design

Well-wrapped cheese

A well-wrapped cheese is a joy to behold, I find. Proper cheese paper and perfectly tucked corners make for a satisfying object to carry home from the market. Though the typeface choice is less convincing, I do like the funny holey cheese illustrations.

Little paper tray signs

Little fluted paper trays play a major role in Berlin eating. They support slices of cake in waxed paper bags being transported from bakeries to offices every day, carefully balanced on the palm of the hand, to be eaten with afternoon coffee. Deeper versions hold Currywurst and Pommes rot-weiß.

Peter Silie Schnitt Lauch Dill

The covers are cheery copy-shop paper in bright parsley green and deep carrot orange. The binding is a simple white rubber band. These boldly typeset little pamphlets introduce three herbs and three root vegetables, respectively: Parsley, chives, dill, beets, celery root and carrot.

I’ve painted the walls!

While waiting for my burrito amidst the colorful cartoon murals of Friedrichshain’s No Hablo Español, I realized that a little masked figure, painted to match the purple characters on the walls, was trying to get my attention. “Do you like what you see?” he was asking. “I’ve painted the walls.”

I've painted the walls!

While waiting for my burrito amidst the colorful cartoon murals of Friedrichshain’s No Hablo Español, I realized that a little masked figure, painted to match the purple characters on the walls, was trying to get my attention. “Do you like what you see?” he was asking. “I’ve painted the walls.”

Poster tunneling

Is this street art or the beginning of a cleanup effort? On Monday, I stopped halfway across Warschauer Brücke to investigate this tunnel cut through hundreds of old wallpaper-pasted posters, almost elbow deep.

Free books

Books for free! What could be better? This relic of East Germany struck me as particularly poignant, not just the sweet composition of crayon-colored triangles typical of DDR graphic design, but the content — presented as a general language guide for tourists, it features just Bulgarian, Romanian, and Hungarian. Within the East Bloc, there weren’t all […]