After sitting inside all day working, by 6:00 p.m. I had to get out and take a walk from here to my beloved Duomo. I had arrived late Tuesday evening, spent Wednesday getting settled and hadn’t yet been to my favorite landmark in town, 2 miles away from my apartment. I must always go to [...]

“The essential is invisible to the eyes.” Painted graffiti on a wall in Palermo.  

The most beautiful thing I saw today. The scene: a building along the west of a busy mall parkway in south Seattle, with a drive through and plantings along the roadside. The headlights from westbound traffic in the right-hand turn lane across the street, are intercepted by this low, trimmed tree and then play across [...]

As a designer and photographer, one of the most stimulating aspects of being in Italy was its visual lushness. Every surface and every structure caught my eye. (Hence, the 16,300 photos I shot in my almost-14-months there!) Before leaving Milano, I told a few friends back home that I was concerned I’d be visually bored [...]

The excitement of a college-time trek through Europe! Hannah & Zibby started together on June 8, in Newcastle Under Lyme. They went on to Amsterdam and Berlin, took a wrong train into Switzerland, and arrived in Milano yesterday. They’ll go on to Venezia, Firenze, Roma, then Athens and Santorini. A time to discover themselves and [...]

They put the temporary, scaffold-and-tin poster walls back up in my neighborhood just in time to feature advertising for the regional elections. Three inch holes are bored into the sidewalk, with rubber plugs for the off-season. Overnight, they can pop the plugs and throw up the walls clean and ready to be weighted with soon-flaking [...]

Milano is a fabulous place to do a “design intensive” exploration, and I’ve stepped up my voracious visual consumption of the rich details around me. What a place to study typography, graphics, signage and advertising! Everything captures my mind. Even a toothpaste ad. “The green has all our respect, the red is the passion we [...]

Walking past the bus stop, this ad stopped me in my tracks. McDonald’s. (A stranger in few parts of the world.) The assurance of 100% Italian Meat. The seared map of Italy on the big Mac meat patty. “When you eat our meat, it’s a whole other story, all Italian. Here’s a link to their website. [...]

A wall along the canal features this singing bluebird and it makes me smile every time. Whether intended or not, it feels “sunny” to me and perks me up. My Grandma would have liked it. Her favorite color was blue. It’s a blue sky Autumn day in Milano today. Mid-60s. Not a cloud and hardly [...]

When they told me you could play football in the streets of Milan during the month of August, they weren’t joking! I had been asked the standard question, “where are you going for August?” Fortunately, I had already made plans for Ischia and Ireland during the month. The Italians are serious about their month-long vacations [...]

The mural right across the grassy patch from the “Ozmo Mural“.

I just liked this!  (Is that a highly stylized “ciao”? Or a tag? It could be both.)   And here are other portions of the same sign:

I have been dreaming… and I am! This poster had my name all over it… and the names of all my family and friends!

The “street art” – the graffiti and murals – around here keeps my fingers clicking. And I find imagery around any corner, behind, under and on top of other things. The back sides of billboards. The hard-to-access building facades. The posters on top of posters, then layered and peeling. I find brick coupled with print [...]

This spiral greeted me as I stepped out of the Romolo subway stop near home.

I’m always looking for an interesting “M”, since that’s my first initial and often how I sign my letters and e-mails. This one is quite beautiful, found just around the corner from my apartment, along the canal.