[info_design] I Want Your Street Sign Pictures!

1104. A few recent posts (and an aside from Sam Adams at the Domain Name Transfer Party) reawakened the Address Nerd in me that's been slumbering for a while, and activated a particular subsector of that attitude regarding street signs–better referred to as blades, because of thier knifelike shape.

I adore these little signs, of course. In a way, a city's street blades function as an aspect of the city's personality. They, if well-designed enough, give you all the information you need to coherently identify your location in a city whether you know the town or not.

Some of them have interesting decorations. Photos of the ones I've seen in New York City have a really cool hi-contrast graphic of the Statue of Liberty on. The ones in our own humble Keizer have the logo of the city on, as to the ones in Vancouver.

I'm making an appeal here. I'm gearing up again to document Portland's street blades. I have that end handled right now, but I'm wondering about what street blades look like in other towns.

I'd like see what other people got! If you live in a town I don't (I live in Greater Portland Oregon, 'member–look at the header image) and you have interesting (or even normal!) street signs that you'd like to show off, might I please request a picture of them? I'll display them here with full credit and linkback.

I want to see what street blades look like all over America. I want to see what other towns' personalities are like. And I want to discover, one by one, how places encode thier grids–location and place–to a blade on a streetcorner, or whatever have you.

This appeal is to anyone within the sound of this blog, anyone who stops by here, from anywhere.

Send your graphics to here (or click on the Gmail email button on the sidebar), and I'll post the with commentary, and we can all have a bull session about them.

Technorati Tags: info design,street signs,street blades,photography,urban design