It’s a slow day at the office, which, today, is a Starbucks on Lower Greenville. I’d been occasioning a place named Crooked Tree in Uptown Dallas [a stuffy little area to be sure] for a few weeks near the beginning of my tenure as a freelancer, but quickly found myself unable to justify the cost of gas, and, the Americano purchase required to tap its faulty internet connection.

Here, linksys is always loyal, and the space is so large that I can easily slide into the corner by the window unseen by the baristas, and likewise unscathed by the rising price of caffeine.

Regardless of their juggernaut nature, I have always been keen on Starbucks’s branding and art direction. All of their pieces gently and maturely tread the balance of function-form to the point that one is nearly unidentifiable from the other [one of the goals of design, I think]. This is of course before mentioning how consistently well done is their color mixing, or the overall quality of the media used.

One of my favorite pieces currently in the store is a display for some of their fall line of coffee mugs and canisters. Hanging from a picnic table over near the counter is an ivory matte-canvas sheet, unpolluted by grunge textures, Gaussian blurs, or gradients. And all that marks its front is paragraph in one of my favorite [squatty] serif fonts of all, Nicholas Cochin, in what else besides a clean, contrasty black.

Cheers.