Blog Backlog: Untitled Works from the DOT Catalog

I rode my bike in to work a few Saturdays ago (to record a phone interview with this video game developer in California -- more on that later, I hope), following a whole new string of bike lanes the Seattle Department of Transportation had laid out over Beacon Hill. They've since come back with their big trucks and painted them in for real, but I kind of preferred the more gestural symbology of the first draft:

See what I mean? Such energetic simplicity of line! Such elemental grace in these stripped-down forms! Why, you can almost hear the wheels spinning on some of them. And such unexpected variety, character, and humor in what might have been a repetitive series: who could have imagined so many different interpretations of this iconic meld of human and machine (note that in some cases humanity has been reduced to a haunting absence)? Even the arrows each convey their own distinct expressive power. I look forward to more works -- however ephemeral -- by this anonymous creative collective.

(I'm also looking forward to more bike rides, now that the journey up Columbian Way feels less like a suicide mission! Thanks for that too, SDOT.)