The apartment signs of L.A. announce location through flair, decadence, strangeness, absurdity, signification. When you see an otherwise unremarkable name affixed to a building in your neighborhood, you know — probably to the exact number of paces or miles, if you counted — how much further your intended destination is. That’s the thing about L.A. apartment signs — they point you toward where you need to be: home. — The Los Angeles Times

Rodeo Road will be renamed after President Barack Obama, city leaders decided this week. But it’s not the first roadway in LA that lawmakers agreed to name after the 44th president.

In 2017, the state legislature approved a resolution to designate the stretch of the 134 freeway that runs between Pasadena and Eagle Rock as the President Barack H. Obama Highway.

A year later, however, there’s little evidence of that decision. — la.curbed.com

While the Brutalist architecture of the MetLife Building, formerly the Pan Am Building, makes this 59-story skyscraper stand out among Midtown’s many tall towers, its large sign touting its namesake makes it easy for all to identify. Beginning this week, the insurance company will replace the massive letters with a brand new typeface, as Crain’s reported. — 6sqft.com

With the issues of serving openly in the military and same-sex marriage now largely resolved, the fight for all-gender restrooms has emerged as the latest civil rights issue in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (L.G.B.T.) community — particularly the “T” part.

Schools and universities (...), museums (...), restaurants (...) and even the White House (...) are recasting the traditional men’s/women’s room, resulting in a dizzying range of (often creative) signage and vocabulary. — the New York Times

In the quest to make parking suck less, there are apps that help you find a space, and meters where you can pay with a swipe of your credit card. But LA has launched a simple, low-tech solution to make parking better: Well-designed signage that offers no ambiguity whatsoever when it comes to where you can park, when you can park there, and how much it will cost. — Gizmodo

Thousands of bus stops in Brazil completely lack signage to indicate which buses actually stop there. The nation-wide inconvenience has finally been tackled by one of the biggest community projects in the world.

‘Que Ônibus Passa Aqui?’ (‘Which Bus Stops here?’) is a resident-led initiative which has taken Brazil by storm. — popupcity.net

“More is more,” was the motto of Deborah Sussman, the graphic designer behind this brilliant visual riot, who died last week at the age of 82. Trained in the office of Charles and Ray Eames, she took their love of colour and pattern to new heights, establishing a studio with her husband, Paul Prejza, that would tackle everything from shop fit-outs to city wayfinding, sprinkling her distinctive brand, like sugary confetti, from Philadelphia to Santa Monica. — theguardian.com

On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin.

“Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement. — politics.suntimes.com

From the sparsely dotted Chinese walking man to the top-hat-wearing, cane-bearing Dane, almost a hundred “walking men” are displayed life-size on banners that line the sidewalk.

“It’s important to me that they are on human scale because they really represent us,” said Ms. Barkai.

Only rarely are the icons depicted as women, she noted. Of the hundreds of images in her collection, Ms. Barkai has only “about six or seven women, mostly from European countries.” — blogs.wsj.com