As the tediousness of the pandemic threatened to dull our perceptions, we found a way to reinvigorate our routine. We get out of the house before the second cup of coffee, before we have read the news and opinion pages. The streets are quiet, the dog walkers aren’t blocking the park entrance, and the trails in the woods are nearly empty. While the rest of America sleeps in, we have been turning in earlier and waking at dawn.
The city or county has put signs up in the park reminding visitors to stay six feet apart. The signs aren’t ugly; they don’t shout, but the message is hard to read from a distance, and the taglines are hard to read even when you’re standing right in front of the signs. They make a former graphic artist wince.
There was an article in the New York Times this morning about how, during the Great Depression, the government put thousands of artists to work under the WPA. Examples of beautiful murals, posters, and signs were cited. In Trump’s world, funding for the arts is a nonstarter. So who do they hire when they want to get something done? The signs in the park look like they were designed by an eighth grader. Who designed Cuomo’s hideous highway signs?
I’m still steaming about the Post Office’s move in the nineties to replace the distinctive 1970 Raymond Loewy logo—the one that fit perfectly on the outdoor boxes—with some sort of italicized, speedy, FedEx-like abomination. The new logo makes the fifties-style boxes look like they’re falling over. The old logos are still there under the bigger parallelograms. Maybe we can steam them off.
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