Back in 2012, Air New Zealand produced an amusing in-flight safety video called “An Unexpected Briefing” with help from Peter Jackson and the Hobbit gang. They recently followed up with a new promotional video titled “Just Another Day in Middle Earth”. The new video includes actual Air New Zealand staff, as well as actors from the Hobbit trilogy and a voice over by the 7th Doctor Who, Sylvester McCoy, who plays the wizard Radagast the Brown.
I’m always a sucker for witty bookshop signage, so I was tickled by the staff’s clever efforts at Kaleido Books in Perth, Australia. If you would like to see more, or connect with the independent bookstore, which is located at Perth’s railway station, just visit them at their Facebook page.
Ed Fairburn is a Cardiff-based Welsh freelance artist who melds geography and art in a powerful marriage of form. His evocative and moving map art is complex, richly textured and always visually stunning. You can see more of his phenomenal work and read about his process on his personal website, and you can support the work by purchasing prints right here too. Take a look:
London-based illustrator and designer Jack Noel has created an ongoing series of shrewdly observed, colorful prints that celebrate the distinct personality and character of London’s boroughs. The project wisely eschews most of tourist London for the genuine, quotidian city.
You can see more from the collection and even purchase limited edition prints here.
Gianluca Biscalchin is an accomplished food and cookbook illustrator, and you may have seen his wonderful series of author illustrations called “Scrittori”. Now he has created this marvelous graphic (see below) called “Literary Coffee”. Enjoy:
In my dotage, my last remaining vice is a serious coffee habit. And, while I try and patronize indie coffeeshops whenever possible, I’m still an unashamed fan of Starbucks. The global coffee colossus is now launching a felicitous collaboration with Swiss railway company SBB to introduce the world’s first “Starbucks Train”. Scheduled to begin running between the Geneva Airport and St. Gallen on November 21st, the coffee train will provide a comfortable lounge for rail traveling coffee fiends on their journey.
I freely admit that I’m a big hypocrite when it comes to using my bike for transportation rather than recreation, but I do admire the people of the Netherlands for their steadfast resolve to replace automobile travel with bicycling whenever feasible.
This neat film, “Groningen: The World’s Cycling City”, explains how it can be accomplished. They managed to increase the bike share of city travel to nearly sixty percent in a generation by pedestrianizing streets, creating ubiquitous bike lanes and designing unique transport circulation patterns. How many other cities could reduce dependence on cars by even ten or twenty percent by following Groningen’s example.
Here in the United States we are accustomed to overwrought travel warnings issued by our State Department on foreign travel. To be fair, most of the governmental travel alerts and notices are based on some reasonable concerns. Now I hear that the French Government has created a website with some appropriate, and some puzzling, travel advisories for French visitors to the U.S.A.. Broken down by zones—East, Central, South and West—the travel warnings list a dozen or so major U.S. cities with specific concerns for each. Some of the warnings are spot on, such as the suggestion to avoid all of Baltimore outside of the city center and the suggestion to be wary of North Philly. But the warnings about New York City seem a generation out of date. The website has some silly warnings about visiting museums, restaurants, the Statue of Liberty, and of all places Times Square.
The website has some other hilarious cautions, such as, beware of giant stingrays and sharks when swimming in the ocean. And there are some disproportionate advisories about police violence. It seems to me that the French Government might help us tourist bumpkins by providing a similar website with warnings about the rampaging gangs of pickpockets and aggressive scam artists in French cities these days. Just saying.
When it’s overrun by cruise ship passengers and daytrippers, Venice can seem more like an Italian Disney World than the true gem that it is to those who love the city. But if you visit out of season, or just wander away from the throngs around Piazza San Marco, Venice remains a magical and enchanting place.
Google Street View is now making it possible to take a virtual tour of La Serenissima, even offering floating views via Google Trekker technology. Now wherever you are it’s possible to vicariously explore one of the world’s great treasures.
Designed by Paris-based illustrator Simon Sek of the design collective LesAnimals, Cliché-sun-Seine is a very clever series of twenty graphic works based one common clichéd element for each Paris arrondissement. Native Parisians, or even regular visitors may quibble with Sek’s choice of clichés, but the posters are certainly fun.
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