I created a new photography section on my site that includes photo series from my recent trips to Mozambique, South Africa, and Belize. Marvel at Communism-inspired street names, charming hair salon signs, and big alligators!

I’ve lived on Mott Street in Chinatown for two years and there are still nearby businesses that I’ve only just discovered… There’s a dusty little aquarium store tucked away down the block, a hole-in-the-wall print shop around the corner, and a spare hair salon with paisley office chairs and a sad-looking palm tree. Some of these places look like they’ve been there for years and they have the yellowed posters to prove it. Others have replaced the ones-that-didn’t-make-it, like the business downstairs that was once a clothes shop and then a strange bracelet/baseball cap store run by three Chinese guys who smoked cigarettes by the door all day. I never saw anyone else in there…

Most of these small storefronts look closed because their windows are blocked by boxes and posters. All of this fodder has piled up to form a new medley of American and Chinese things from posters for Tony Bennett concerts and Sheryl Crow albums to packaging for hair loss tonics and natural plant foot patches. It’s a Chinamerican collage and it all fuses together in this pharmaceutical poster above with old white people and a Chinese headline. Who is this for?

It’s so easy to put off visiting places that will always be a minute away… I’ve been meaning to go to The New Museum since its November opening, but it always seems too cold or too closed or too afternoony when it comes to mind. And it comes to mind often because it’s like a constant mountain backdrop when I’m noodling around the neighborhood. I’ve run out of excuses and finally ventured over to the big gray boxes today.

I’m glad I did because there was a cool project all about neighborhood mapping. It’s called The Last Tourist Cairo by Dutch artist Jan Rothuizen and it’s on the 5th floor. Two posters feature Rothuizen’s hand-drawn maps of the area around his temporary Cairo home, notes about his personal experiences and impressions of the area, and short interviews with local residents. It was modest and casual and totally absorbing. I saw where he got his hair cut and that he too felt silly for having not visited the big museum a few blocks away. I saw the layout of his apartment he shared with a man who loves shoes. I read his interviews, including one with a guy who obsessively photographed a particular poster of a local political candidate.

Through all these snippets I quickly gained an in-depth and poignant portrait of Cairo and his stay, and it reminds me of the ways I want to know and document my own neighborhood and travels. Yay for maps! Unfortunately the posters aren’t online, but you can see a chopped up online version of the project here.

Design studio Second Story makes beautiful exhibit sites and Yin Yu Tang: A Chinese Home is one of my favorites. Take a guided tour through a traditional Chinese home and learn about the ginormous family that lived there for eight generations. The 3-d model highlights rooms and structural elements as you marvel at old artifacts like the nail-less wooden joints and the family’s ornate porcelain urinal. And if you’re ever near Boston, you can visit the real deal at the Peabody Essex Museum, where the 200-year-old Chinese house was brought and reassembled.

This is the entrance sign of the township I worked in while I was in Johannesburg in 2007. Vaseline donated money for a park (”Vaseline Park”), address signs (”#5095… Protected by Vaseline”), and a giant billboard welcoming all to Diepsloot, sponsored by your favorite petroleum jelly… Ya.

Time for a little true story and one of my favorite design tales… When graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister invited his friend Reini to visit him in New York City in 1988, his friend was concerned about his chances with the ladies. Would New York’s beautiful-but-tough women ignore him? In response, Sagmeister created a poster of his friend’s face under a bold black font declaring, “Dear Girls! Please Be Nice to Reini” and plastered copies on walls throughout his Lower East Side neighborhood. The poster became a local sensation and Reini left New York with a girlfriend. The power of a neighborhood poster (*tear*)…

The New York Times makes extraordinary information graphics and this is one of my favorites. It’s something most New Yorkers have asked at one point or another: is it better to buy or rent? Punch in your specific numbers and see a chart pin-pointing the year that you become a sucker for paying your monthly rent. It also includes a breakdown of costs and adjustable factors. And better yet, if you’ve ever wondered how insanely much your apartment would cost if you could buy it, this interactive graphic does that too!

2006 was a landmark year that made for a wow statement: for the first time, over half the world’s population live in cities. That number is projected to increase to 2/3 by 2050. Inspired by this fact, 19.20.21 is taking the bull by the horns with a five-year study of 19 cities in the world (with 20 million people in the 21st century). The Flash website is a clean and bold narrative of this upcoming project that will gather and compare data on big city issues like transportation, health, crime, education, culture and art, and growth patterns.

This is super cool. Best practices are shared between cities all the time, but they’re usually presented as isolated fragments or stuffed away in dry reports. It would be very awesome to compare notes on all issues and see just how the world’s cities line up against each other - and in handsome fashion (the Center for Architecture’s current Berlin-New York Dialogues exhibit begins to do this between two cities).

This reminds me of Herbert Bayer’s wondrous information design for the 1953 book World Geographic Atlas: A Composite of Man’s Environment (click the image and zoom in to marvel at those hot pages). It’s the ultimate data porn and I hope 19.20.21 will carry that proud torch forward. I’m already enticed by the site’s presentation of the largest cities through time, and after some Googling found out this project is spearheaded by Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer/architect who created TED and coined the term “information architect.” He’s my new hero.

It’s true, it’s true… the White New York City Subway map haha (thanks Matty). Made by Streeter Seidell, whose blog I just started reading and now I can’t stop. He funnee.

For ladies who lunch and drunk hipsters alike, New York City’s yellow taxis have been a one-for-all staple. Did you know that one-fourth of NYC cab drivers quit within a year? A quarter of cab passengers earn less than $25,000. And JFK has a 4-acre taxi pit stop that includes a cone-delineated space for prayer (above). These are some of the interesting facts I picked up while reading Design Trust for Public Space’s Taxi 07: Roads Forward (free download online).

An extensive look at New York City’s taxi system and how it can be improved, the recently-released book is a well-designed and well-photographed study devoted to NYC’s fleet of 13,000 yellow ones. It not only clarifies the current system, like the ways a cab can be owned and operated, but it provides recommendations for the future, including group ride locations, rideshare fees, metro card overlap, and fast-pass-like incentives for cab drivers to venture off into the borough wilderness.