Neighborhood Design Watch: Cardon Copy

What an exotic cat and a stellar cleaning lady have to do with visual aestheticism.

Imagine, if you will, the days before Craigslist. Local business was done mostly through neighborhood flyers announcing anything from a yard sale to a lost cat. Today, these dinosaurs of communication still exist, although much rarer, and remain the same visual atrocities they always were.

Enter Cardon Copy — designer Cardon Webb’s bold mission to hijack these unseemly pieces, redesign them with a powerful visual message, and replace the original with its aesthetically upgraded version.

Part neighborhood Banksy, part Pixelator, part utterly original, the project is pure conceptual genius.

Besides being a noble crusade for everyday visual literacy, Cardon Copy is also the most brilliant self-promotion by a designer we’ve ever encountered.

And we love the extraordinary lengths Cardon has gone to with this, indiscriminately and cleverly redesigning even the most illegible to make it, well, just as illegible but oh-so-much easier on the eyes.

We can’t wait until someone (psst, Cardon, need a new project?) hijacks Craigslist listings, no less visually atrocious than your typical neighborhood flyer, and embarks upon a similar digital mission.

Dev-design geeks, start your engines.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 6:53 am in culture, design and was tagged cool, culture, design, guerrilla, urban.

Stunning idea. But lets be honest, while they’re indeed lovely, some of them are just plain unreadable.

simon on July 16th, 2009 at 9:18 am

[...] neighbourhood communication was done throught the humble flyer? Well, designer Cardon Webb has hijacked some fairly standard examples of the local flyer and created “aesthetically upgraded [...]

Just a little something to think about… | Outside the black box on July 19th, 2009 at 7:11 pm

Great: Neighborhood Design Watch: http://bit.ly/t12sI ;-p

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

Baseland29salom on September 16th, 2009 at 10:13 pm

Great: Neighborhood Design Watch: http://bit.ly/t12sI cool

GregorymagentaZ on September 17th, 2009 at 8:05 pm

Great: Neighborhood Design Watch: http://bit.ly/t12sI 8-]

copeGeorge4646 on September 25th, 2009 at 3:16 pm

Brilliant – Sophie Blackall illustrates Craigslist missed connections http://is.gd/3KC7C. Reminiscent of Cardon Copy http://is.gd/3KCao

brainpicker on September 28th, 2009 at 10:07 am

Great: Neighborhood Design Watch: http://bit.ly/t12sI ..

bobbyBass6262 on October 5th, 2009 at 5:35 am

Great: Neighborhood Design Watch: http://bit.ly/t12sI XD

Bonjo4545king on October 8th, 2009 at 7:20 pm

jerry58apple on October 11th, 2009 at 2:19 am

Great: Neighborhood Design Watch: http://bit.ly/t12sI

KilleriMonste79 on October 11th, 2009 at 6:39 pm

Jojo91stupid on October 12th, 2009 at 3:39 pm

Remember Cardon Copy? (http://is.gd/4lviz) Simon Attwater does the same with typographic shopping lists http://is.gd/4lvi7

brainpicker on October 15th, 2009 at 8:32 pm

Neighborhood Design Watch: Cardon Copy | Brain Pickings http://ow.ly/15Vhpf

loopdiloop on October 16th, 2009 at 2:53 am

Nice RT @loopdiloop Neighborhood Design Watch: Cardon Copy | Brain Pickings http://ow.ly/15Vhpf

creatad on October 16th, 2009 at 3:20 am

” You are not an artist. You are here to solve a problem.” – Don Draper to Peggy Olson, Mad Men

This memorable quote from a memorable show sums up design in two sentences. If the piece doesn’t solve the problem, doesn’t communicate the message, then it’s either 1) art or 2) bad design.

While these pieces look lovely, they DON’T communicate the message clearly and must be considered failures as design. Overlaid blackletter “gangster” type for a cleaning lady? Helvetica so miniscule on a No Parking sign that it can’t be read even when you’re IN the parking spot? Illegible type that’s somehow better than the original illegible type because it’s done in an ironically cool way? Give me a break.

And all I can think of with the missing cat poster is that joke email that did the rounds a few months back about the designer who designed a lost cat poster as a movie poster, with the cat “lost in the negative space”. And how we all laughed about how stupid and out of touch with reality designers are… and here it is in real life.

The only really successful design out of these is the math lessons poster, which is quite excellent.