Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Suburban Zoning + Graphic Design = Cartoon Architecture

Here's a quiz for you. Can you guess what three buildings are depicted in the image above? The answers are at the end of this blog post. You probably know what businesses are housed in these garish buildings even though they've been motion blurred. This post isn't intended to be some diatribe against the fast food industry. Jaimie Oliver (TED Prize) and Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me) have that covered. I went to Google Street View hunting for what New Urbanism proponent James Howard Kunstler calls cartoon architecture. Road engineers design design our streets and boulevards for maximum speed. So when you're driving by at 45 - 50 MPH you can't easily read restaurant sign. Marketers, graphic designers and architects are cleaver people and if you pay them enough they'll come up with a solution. A few commonalities with the various building are bright colors and simple shapes in the building and logo markings. Noticed that the further the set back the bigger and taller the front sign is. When traveling down the Boulevard at 50 MPH you can't turn sideways so businesses have to orient their front sign perpendicular to the street and very high in the air. Gas stations along the highway have signs that rise several stories high to signal your attention from miles away. Is there a correlation between the cartoonishness of a building and the merits of it's products and services?
  1. McDonald's
  2. KFC
  3. BP Gas 
Disclosure: To compensate for Google Street View's image compression methods these images have been color corrected. Using Photoshop the images were auto leveled and given a saturation of +40 to better simulate reality. A 0 degree, 40 pixel motion blur was then applied to 640 pixel wide image.
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