John Lorinc has a piece in the Globe and Mail today about the TTC’s lack of good merchandise available to the public. And the Spacing buttons are part of the article’s analysis.
No one expects the sale of branded transit merchandise to save the TTC from its money problems. But some transit watchers are asking whether the commission has paid enough — or indeed any — attention to sexing up its brand, especially in light of the success of agencies in New York, Los Angeles and London, where hip, branded merchandise sells briskly in transit stores and on the Internet.
And Ian Daffern also has an article on a small group of artists who use unsuspecting subway and transit riders as models in his sketchbook. They do this once every week on Sunday afternoons.
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A couple of years ago in NYC I saw that every souvenir shop had subway-related t-shirts in stock. A simple and stylish design: the circle logo for each of the lines.
I thought “Why the hell doesn’t the TTC do something like this?”
In art school I made a two-colour print of the streetcar, one of the city’s icons, that would look great on a t-shirt. (Well, if I re-did it more neatly…)