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.

A Better Jacksonville by (Information) Design: Message to AIGA JAX

In an article from EU Jacksonville, Joey Marchy, Co-Chair of AIGA Jacksonville, misses an opportunity with an argument made about the following dialogue.

[…]

“Graphic Design in the city will continue marching forward, elevate the city in ways we haven't experienced”

To which a reader responds,

[…]

“What, nicer ads being put up?”

Graphic Design or Visual Communications as some call it, can address problems in fields other than marketing, commerce or even city ambiance. What about Information Design? Take this image of London in 1954. It was drawn by physician, John Snow who had a theory about the death rates due to cholera as correlation to contaminated water from a communal pump on Broad Street. The black bars represent deaths from cholera and the dot in the middle is the Broad Street water pump. Clearly there was clustering around the suspected pump, but it was the outlying data points that revealed the answer. A woman who lived closer to different pump preferred to have water carried to her from the Broad Street pump contracted cholera. And the beer workers who lived and worked near the pump were saved because they drank almost exclusively beer and not the well water which it turns out was contaminated with sewage. Saved by great design (and possibly beer).[1]

While this story is a seminal moment in modern epidemiology it also goes to prove that graphic design is not frivolity. It saves lives and transforms our cities. As I mentioned in my previous blog post about brain drain, we need to find ways to connect people of all professions here in Jacksonville. Better design in this case can be information dense and interdisciplinary. I wonder how many Information Designers belong to AIGA Jacksonville.

Watch this lecture by Stephen Johnson explain this better than I do. Steven Johnson tours the Ghost Map | Video on TED.com

[1] Tufte, Edward R. “Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions.” Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press, 1997. 27-37

Edward Tufte is a genius of information design whose work has made a profound influence on the design of our visual world.