The Times Square Tapes

I love the energy and chaos of New York City. Nowhere else is this more apparent than in Times Square where a thousand images and signs compete for your attention in a marketplace of ideas and commerce.

In my first job out of college, I used to create maps and diagrams and label them via a machine that would spit out text on tape you could transfer to paper. You could put labels on top of labels and not have the layers of tape show up when it was reproduced. If you made a mistake, you could sometimes remove and reposition the tape. But sometimes you would pull some of the text up and leave some behind. The result was, like Times Square, a pastiche of competing layers.

This experiment was an effort to recreate the look of that old analog production method.