“Weekend With” is a new series that explores the world of design through the eyes of a designer on their days off. Our last installment took us on a typographic tour of Chinatown with Tracy Ma. This week, Silas Munro, founder of poly-mode, assistant professor at Otis College of Art and Design, and an advisor and chair emeritus at Vermont College of Fine Arts, takes us through a typical weekend in his adopted home of Los Angeles.
Weekends in L.A. can feel like planning for a 36-hour road trip, both figuratively and literally. My partner and I are at the end of a year-long renovation of a condo in Palm Springs that will be our weekend getaway and a rental income stream, so we are intimately familiar with every In-N-Out Burger along the 60 and the 10. Thank god for Waze! I’m fascinated by the range of graphic design in this area: from the red and yellow retro Americana signage to the abstracted palm trees on plastic cups to my GPS, where post-internet icons of ghosts overlay the linear gradients of our city’s streets.
Illustration by Anna Rupprecht