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.

Illustration Showcase: 5 Artists to Watch 5 incredible illustration artists to watch....
Book Spotlight: Design Revolution From the world's smartest socially-conscious designers, 100 products that improve lives in brilliant and elegant ways....
Design-Off: Top 3 Live Design Competitions Cardboard monsters, digital marathons, and why design is just like tennis....
Thirty Conversations on Design 30 of the world’s most inspired creatives answer two straightforward but incredibly complex questions: "What single example of design inspires you most?" and "What problem should design solve next?"...
More Than Form: Design for Disability 3 designers who tackle physical and metal disability through smart objects....

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