(Taken with my iPhone)

Hilarious.

One of the shops I have been wanting to visit ever since I painted my bedroom was Timeless Treasures. D*S wasn’t lying when they described it as an “Alphabet City.” I spent over an hour in this tiny shop, but I could have spent the entire day there. Frank Sinatra sang to me as I browsed through the drawers and shelves of letters trying to think of something brilliant to spell. In the end, however, I walked away empty handed. $85 for a 14″ vintage letter “A” just isn’t in my budget right now. But I didn’t leave disappointed. I had a great conversation with the woman working there and I got a batch of inspiring photographs. I hope you get the chance to take an adventure here one day too.

To view Play With Type in its entirety visit the project blog.

A nice little music video for Kid Cudi ‘Make Her Say’ featuring Kanye West & Common. I enjoy how the split screen is a subtle parallel to the mash-up of the artists. The visual direction of this video was an unexpected, but happy find this morning. Enjoy.

A super-cool old truck parked [eternally] near 19th and Harrison in San Francisco. Check out the gradient on the hand-painted logo!

(A quick Google search for Berkel revealed that the truck could be from a once “leading manufacturer of food equipment; providing high quality meat slicers, mixers and packagers” Nice.)

On my last visit to Urban Outfitters, I noticed a do-it-yourself aesthetic unlike any retail store I’ve ever been in. All aspects of the store, the checkout counter, the fitting rooms, the displays, and the art on the wall, were hand-made with little more than plywood, fabric and spray paint. I even saw quite a few items in home furnishings that had “free” written on them. I had to do a double take to realize that I wasn’t in a thrift store.

Somehow this D.I.Y. environment works for this demographic, but it raised a lot of questions for me. I wonder how much of a role the employees have in building the “sets?” It also makes me curious about the people shopping here. Urban Outfitters is not cheap, yet it disguises itself as a thrift store. What is the desire to shop here over repurposing pre-existing objects such as the ones that Urban Outfitters uses as backdrops for their overpriced goods?

Located at 804 Montgomery St in San Francisco, William Stout Architectural Books carries over 20,000 titles on two floors in the fields of architecture, art, urban planning, graphic and industrial design, furniture and interior design, and landscape architecture. For over thirty years, twenty in the current location, it has been a vital resource for architecture and design books, carrying American and international titles, both in and out of print.

The origins of the bookstore date back to when Bill Stout was a practicing architect and would go to Europe and bring back hard to find European architectural books. His colleagues and friends would ask him to bring them back additional copies and thus the shop was born. About ten years ago, he started William Stout Publishers, which puts out a few books a year, mainly on architecture and landscape in the Bay Area, but also including books on architectural theory, and reprints of important, out of print titles.

Search their collection.