This morning I passed an interesting bus shelter. It was so interesting I had to get off my bike (going up hill) and walk back a block in order to get a picture.

Blooming Muni Bus Shelter at Masonic & Oak, San Francisco, CA

I snapped a picture and went on with my day. It wasn’t until I decided to do some internet research that I found that this sort of thing isn’t isolated. There’s one over on Chestnut and Pierce as well. Equally as beautiful, but what does it mean??

Well Muni Diaries cracked the case…see the ad on the far end of the shelter for some flowery deoderent? Yeah, i didn’t catch that either. The moral? Sometimes doing something so out of the ordinary will gain attention, but in the end everyone remembers the spectacle, not the product.

A few people have been sharing this video on Facebook and I wanted to share it here as well. This is pretty amazing. These devices fit 200 bicycles in the ground space that would normally fit only a few.

While this is surely an amazing feat of engineering, I’m not sure SF could justify the cost of putting one of these in. The SF Bike Coalition is awesome at providing bike valet service at most events where bike parking is an issue.  And while the video doesn’t say so, i’m thinking the owners of the bikes would probably have to pay a fee to park their bikes in one of these. In SF I would be more than happy with an abundance of staple bike racks. What do you think?

Surfing the web the other day I came across this flat pack bike helmet. It’s a really cool example of innovative industrial design. It could come in handy when traveling, as a regular bike helmet takes up a lot of space in a suitcase. This thing looks cool, but i’m wondering if it could ever pass safety standards to be sold in stores, at least in the US.

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Helvetica/Arial logo quiz by Ironic Sans

Anyone in the design world, and even some who aren’t (thanks largely to the movie of the same name) are familiar with the typeface Helvetica. Helvetica was developed in Switzerland in 1957 to be used in a wide verity of circumstances. It was designed with clarity in mind and without any defining flourishes. I would personally describe the font as very uniform, geometric, and square. Its popularity is astounding and it’s a very well respected typeface today just as it was when it was initially developed.

In 1982 Microsoft developed a typeface called Arial to be bundled with their software package Most people in the know will tell you that Arial is a cheap imitation of Helvetica, and are appalled when they see it used in design.

Can you tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica? Here are a couple of quizes to test your typography smarts.

Choose if a set of phrases are written in Arial or Helvetica

Helvetica/Arial logo quiz. Which is the original (Helvetica)?