Merry Christmas

Well, truth be told, I've seen quite a bit of Papyrus lately (always) but I never seem to have my camera available. There is a nice Mexican restaurant in Mill Creek called Azul. (In an upscale area near a nice shopping center) And guess what, everything from type on their logo, to the hours decaled on the glass, to the headers on the menu have one thing in common. It seems papyrus wins again.

I am sorry I didn't get any pictures, but feel free to visit their website for a small idea:
http://www.azullounge.com/index.html

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and is enjoying their break from school or work.

I think I know why the first six failed...

Ladies and gentlemen,

Hello. This weekend I traveled with some lovely people to Seattle for a good time of hanging out and not being in Idaho. For just a few minutes we stepped inside a mall. According to their website:

Pacific Place is downtown Seattle's premier shopping, dining and entertainment center. Featuring Tiffany & Co., MaxMara and Coach along with J. Crew, Chico's, Ann Taylor, Helly Hansen, L'Occitane, Restoration Hardware, Barnes & Noble and Williams-Sonoma. An 11-screen AMC Theatres complex. Skybridge connection to the flagship Nordstrom store.

Blah blah blah. Basically it's a really yuppie mall and no one my age can afford anything in it. So of course I was extremely surprised when I saw the new store going in next to Express: Seven salon. Of course any place going into this mall is going to have a nice identity designed by some respected design firm... right? Well in this case I sure hope not. As you can see their logo consists simply of the word "seven" in papyrus and a papyrus number 7 knocked out of a black circle. Are you kidding me? Whoever designed this corporate identity thought that everything that they needed to say about this company could be done with papyrus and nothing else (besides the color orange I guess). So if you ever want a haircut that looks like it was done in Egypt a thousand years ago... this is the store for you.

A sad case of framepyrus

Okay so here's the deal. This is a nice frame. And I think it's fairly obvious what it is. (a frame) But for some reason the person that designed the frame insert decided to have all the text be the same nice and classy serif typeface (makes sense right...?) EXCEPT the word "frame" has to be 10 times bigger than any other word on the thing and is in PAPYRUS. To me it seems crazy, dumb, and very not cohesive to take just the word "frame" and single it out by making it huge and slapping papyrus on it.

Sorry for the bad picture quality.

This is not made up

I saw this sign in Nampa near the corner of 9th and 7th (in case you want to check it out for yourself). It is 100% real I promise. It's just so sad that this sign was most likely designed by a "Graphic Designer." The cityscape, sleek simple shapes, and bright yellow all suggest hip, metropolitan, exciting, etc. Then why in the world would they want to put a typeface that is meant to look as if you were writing on Papyrus?! Don't they know that papyrus is ancient and there is nothing modern or urban about it?! This just baffles me. Obviously there are some other issues with the type as well, but I'm trying to restrain myself by just focusing on the selection of the Papyrus typeface. Please don't buy a house from this company.

some other (less exciting) typography

Seeing that I haven't seen any glaring Papyrus lately (or maybe I'm just learning to block it out), I thought I'd share this lovely sign I stumbled across in McDonalds. Notice the use of both Brush Script and everyone's favorite: Arial! Not to mention the neat burst graphic. I almost had some Batman flashbacks.

I think it's clear that McDonald's hired the right Graphic Designer for this job!


(please excuse the cell phone quality of this image)

R.W. Emerson

So I was visiting some friends in Twin Falls this weekend and I couldn't help but notice this inspirational plaque Michelle had above her desk. I'm pretty sure Emerson used to write everything on papyrus paper so it makes sense to me.

some local zest

I thought I'd start with some local advertisements I found in the 2007 NNU scambook.

The text is almost as exotic as you will be after you tan here.


Nothing says "We're a hip church with pastors that ride Harleys" quite like Papyrus.

As you can tell, some of the advertising around Nampa is pretty fancy. It's just nice to know that so many people find Papyrus to be such a neat "font" and I just want to encourage that with this blog. I hope you enjoy, and please feel free to send me anything that you find.