As any self respecting cigar or pipe smoker knows, the best way to light up is by using a wooden match. As such, I’ve got a boxes of wooden matches stashed all over the house, garage, pockets and car. It is one of those items that you never really think about too hard though. There’s no real reason to think about them beyond “does it work as advertised?” — in this case, does it light? Or did it break?

Recently, though, I picked up a box at the supermarket and noticed they had changed vendors. No longer was…whatever brand they previously sold. Now they upgraded to offer Diamond matches. It’s not an item that I would even notice usually, but as a designer I was immediately struck by the packaging. I have some vague memory of the brand, but it seems as though they’ve gone through a redesign. And I love it. It’s clean with a touch of vintage and really stands out on a shelf.

Digging a little deeper, it seems like the brand has be tossed around by various holding companies and private equity firms which makes it seem a bit less glamorous than America’s leading producer of matches.

But those graphics! The design! The style! What’s a poor designer to do, but start drawing?

Here’s a couple of versions of the single and crossed match illustrations and because it’s one of my favorite techniques, there’s also animated versions. Dropping a <style> tag inside the SVG with @keyframe animations is a great way to sneak an animation past a content management system. Just be sure you nest the animation inside a prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference media query.

The animation itself is just a combination of scale, translate and rotate transformations. The one nice one is the ability to flip the flame by using a negative value on the X axis of a scale transformation.

transform: scaleX(-1);

I did consider doing a more elaborate animation, but…discretion is the better part of valor as they say. It quickly became clear that going down that path was leading further and further away from the inspiration point. Clean, crisp and iconic, thank you very much.

Tangentially, I do like the concept of a matched pair, burning together. Makes me think of my wife.

Need a light? You can download them here.

And the dark humor that sustains us.

Back in 2016, a video game came out that was somewhat prescient — Tom Clancy’s The Division. Maybe prescience is easy when the humanity is so predictably set on self-destruction, glorifies ignorance and revels in ineptitude. Sorry, that’s a bit harsh, I know.

It’s a great game and my wife and I pre-ordered it mostly due to it being based in NYC. A triple A game with highly detailed, open world maps of Manhattan? And a Tom Clancy based story? Yes, please.

And it’s a great game! We had a ton of fun running around all the neighborhoods we know and love. My wife would join friends online and point out our apartment or my office. We note differences between fiction and reality as we worked through missions.

And that’s where this little guy comes in. I think it was in the Brooklyn section of the game and in an alley, it was a large graffiti on the wall. This was also when I was drawing the symbols from Destiny ultimately leading to the Symbology project. Naturally, I was immediately drawn to this cool illustration, a symbol of sorts, a smiling wink and a nod, a thumb in the eye of authority in the face of disaster.

Flash forward to 2020 and there’s an actual global pandemic. And there are refrigerator trucks on the streets of Manhattan trying to hold all the dead bodies. Sorry, that’s a bit harsh, I know.

As it wasn’t part of the Symbology project, this illustration never had a home. Now it does. If you need a symbol for a bit of “screw you,” please take it. We need more signs. We need more humor. We need more ways to laugh at our despair.

You can download a version in JPG and SVG format here.

Wandering around some of the little towns outside of New York City and we found this wonderful piece of public sculpture — a giant head laying on it’s side on a massive marble stone. It’s the first of an edition of six cast from a 38 ton marble sculpture from artist Henry Schiowitz. The name of the series is Homage to the Masters.

It’s truly impressive in three ways. First, the concept. It’s an idea I’ve always loved — the mystery of a forgotten past, a broken piece of an epic tale fallen and discarded just waiting for discovery. It triggers all the fantasy and science fiction stories I’ve read. It echoes the pyramids of Egypt and Guatemala and those past civilizations. It’s the concept of something bigger than ourselves reinforcing our short lives and the fallacy of ego against time. I want one in my yard. I need one in my yard half buried looking out at the forest.

Secondly, the scale. The bronze weighs over 2,100 pounds and the marble base weighs 14 tons. It’s just…giant. You can almost feel the weight. There is also a delicacy to the sculpture as all that bronze is balanced on the stone at only three points.

The third impressive feature (or perhaps mystery), is the location. It’s perched just off the sidewalk next to a residential house and in front of a parking lot. It’s claustrophobic for something so massive. Something so big needs more space to breathe. Perhaps the location choice was intentional — to put it somewhere unexpected, as if the town grew up around the ancient head to imbue it with a deeper sense of time and history. To magnify this odd location choice, it’s directly across the street from an small public park (and parking lot). One would think a park would be the natural choice for a public sculpture, but no, it sits…amidst the modern world somewhat hidden and diminished from it’s past glory.

Sparkill, New York.

It’s always nice to find street art in a neighborhood filled with high end art galleries. A good sized stencil piece tucked inside a loading dock reminiscent in subject matter of that other famous, shall not be identified street artist. Plus, the bonus of people being moved enough by it to contribute their own messages.

Chelsea, Manhattan.

An older photo I found in the archives that never got posted. It looks to be a commission from TotemGraffx for a cannabis shop next door. I recall it being a bit hidden with an overpass (maybe the High Line?) to the left. The whole black background helps to keep it a little unnoticed while still making all the gorgeous foreground colors stand out. Also an interesting contradiction between the loose feather painting (almost brush like) and the precision line work in the lettering below.

Midtown, Manhattan.

I feel like I know this dog. He’s patient. She’s kind. The illustration is simple and emotive. The thick white border is a sign of an experienced hand. It’s not easy to make minimal be immediately recognizable.

Midtown, Manhattan.

Another photo found in the 2025 archives to bring a bit of blue to the site. It’s a wonderful gradient that just jumps out. Paired with a strong black outline shadow and all the little white highlights and it’s really glowing. Well practiced, very experienced and well executed.

Lower East Side, Manhattan.

Bringing a bit of color into the new year, by digging through the last of last year’s photos. It’s a classic take by a skilled artist. Three colored outlines, internal shading and highlights, arrow quotes and a two toned background — there’s a ton of good work going on in this piece. The shape of the lettering gives it a good flow too. Here’s hoping this new year is filled with lots of color and flow.

Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan.

Putting “preserve” back in the phrase “nature preserve”

Read last year’s post or view the updated photo gallery.

It would seem that this is becoming an annual report which is somewhat funny and also somewhat sad. I do like the aspect of reporting and in this age of propaganda, distortion and denial, it’s more important than ever to show the proof. The idea of an “annual report” is funny to me as it reminds me of the how it all started and the “local archeology” tagline. It’s a bit of dark humor pulling us out of the dismay. There is no corporation here, no investor relations, no government agency requiring a report of my activities. There’s just an art project tied onto the back of a hike while cleaning up the neighborhood.

So how did 2025 go?

The year was both more active and more focused. Last winter when the snow covered everything hiding man’s many sins, I used the time to scout for areas that needed attention. Turns out, this was time well spent and come summer, I was able to go back and tackle three or four problem areas leading to huge progress. These areas are spots of commercial dumping and led to an increase in trash volume and trash weirdness. I’ll still need to follow up on them as the forest continues to spit out and reveal more trash, but a significant amount of clean up reduced the obvious blight. Disappointingly, I also discovered some new trouble spots which will lead the 2026 adventures.

The Trash

In addition to the usual containers this year, I started using a couple of old masonry tubs on my hand truck to help carry out stuff that just didn’t fit nicely into a bag or bucket. These bins quickly became essential for large pickups in areas of commercial dumping. It’s also worth noting that as I ranged further I actually had to start to use our car. It was too far from the house and the terrain is too rough to physically carry out the trash. There were two car loads in December.

Using the same conservative estimates from 2023, 50 pounds per bag comes out to 2,900 pounds for the bags. For the buckets, using the conservative estimate of 20 pounds per bucket leads to a total of 820 pounds of trash put in buckets. The bins are a bit more awkward due to their shape, so estimate the trash weight by volume is difficult. They were often lighter, but held oversize items to keep them from falling off the hand truck. Let’s go with an estimate of 10 pounds per bin for a total of 330 pounds. Additionally, there’s also the category of the unwieldy and unweighted. Things like truck tires, large pipes or car transmissions just never get weighed or factored into these estimates. It would be cool one day to get an old large farm scale to just drop items onto for actual weights. Maybe one day.

This leads to a total estimate of 4,050 pounds of trash removed in 2025 surpassing the amounts collected in the previous two years. Over 2 tons (2.025) of trash removed from the forest without even factoring in many of the larger items.

Here’s a list of some of the items that jumped out

• Car batteries
• Concrete blocks
• Steel buckets
• Shovel heads
• Appliance motors and parts
• New York and Connecticut license plates
• Children’s pacifier
• Concrete parking blocks
• Car headrest
• Windshield wipers
• Pitchfork
• Styrofoam packing
• Lawnmower handle
• Box springs
• Automotive car seat
• Porcelain vase
• Heating vent cover
• Cast iron pipes
• Plastic green doormat
• Home stereo receiver
• Iron weight from a window sash
• Large truck inner tube
• Electric weed wacker string trimmer tool
• Car and truck tires
• Screen window
• Beach chair chaise lounge
• Carpet and foam padding
• Roof shingles
• Fluorescent light bulbs
• Insulation panels
• Garden hoses
• School bell
• Soccer balls
• Hypodermic needle
• Champagne bucket
• Axe head
• Car axles with transmission housings and drum brakes
• Metal shopping cart

Where’s it all go?

One thing I also wanted to answer in this year’s update is a question I sometimes get from folks: “What do you do with it?”.

For the trash, it easy, just put it out for the town to pick up. The really big, awkward or dangerous stuff gets loaded into the car and taken over to the county’s Household Materials Recovery Facility (H-MRF) which is really…the dump. It’s free for county residents and you don’t even have to get out of your car. Just pop open the back and they pull everything out, but you do have to make a reservation online beforehand. It’s also notable that in 2025, they are now required to track how many tires you bring over. I don’t think there’s a limit, but probably something the county needs to report on.

Alternatively, the town offers a bulk pickup service. It’s a bit random, so you never known when they’re going to show up. You just have to put the stuff out front and wait. They also have more restrictions on what they’ll take (no tires or batteries), so I’ve been using the service less and less. I also think it’s more neighborly to not leave a giant pile of rusting metal out front of my house for two weeks until the town comes by to pick it up.

For the recycling, there’s the trusty town bin and this is where the volume gets a bit crazy. We have a town provided 35 gallon blue wheeled bin for “co-mingled” recycling — basically plastic, metal and glass. In our house, there’s just no way my wife and I could ever fill the recycling bin that size on our own. With the large volumes of bottles and cans I’m pulling out of the woods, the 35 gallon bin is completely full almost ever week. Often times with 2-3 accompanying bags as well. The bin says it has a load rating of 122.5 pounds, but let’s dial that down a bit. If we estimate that the materials weight is 80 pounds and it’s full 35 weeks out of the year, we’re looking at 2,800 pounds of recycling. Subtracting the weight of our usual weekly household recycling of…maybe 15 pounds…and we’re looking at 2,275 pounds of recycling removed from the forest.

Remember kids, picking up the trash is only half the job. Packing it out of the woods and disposing of it properly is often to hardest part.

The Design and Development

There were only a few development changes to the gallery this year. The majority of the effort was in processing and formatting the increased amount of photos. It seems I was much better in my documentation efforts in 2025.

Typography

I swapped out the typeface used for the bold subheads (Canada Type’s Gibson) due to license restrictions when I canceled my Adobe subscription. The new font (Argentum Novus) isn’t visually identical, but it’s close enough to fool most non-designers.

UX/UI

As the page was growing and growing longer, I realized it needed a couple of UI improvements to help the UX. Notably, a few navigation links so that visitors can quickly jump to a specific year. Likewise, since the new navigation links are not sticky and scroll off screen, I added a “return to top” button to allow visitors to jump back to the top of the page.

The links to each year’s blog post were also moved from the page header to under the heading for each year. I also added in some horizontal rules to help define each year’s section. They come in handy when scrolling along as there’s not a lot of visible space between each year’s images.

Looking Ahead

While on my winter snow hikes to scout for trouble spots, I also began expanding my range into another, larger, neighboring park. This one is managed by the county (not the town) and generally, is in better shape, but of course, my keen eyes can find a broken bottle or rusty beer can anywhere. There’s the opportunity that I may start pulling trash from this new park as I just can’t…leave it. But the work on the first park will take priority. There’s no reason to give up before the job is finished. Here’s to making your neighborhood a little cleaner, a little brighter and a little healthier for the future.

Please don’t litter.

View the updated photo gallery

Finding the overlap between digital and physical worlds.

Every winter it snows. Every winter I shovel and every winter I think about writing this post. Now I’m finally getting around to gathering my ideas. In hindsight, it seems obvious, but it wasn’t until I started shoveling snow every winter that I made the connection between my accessibility work in web design and making my sidewalk accessible.

Background

Like a lot of city dwellers, shoveling snow isn’t really something you think about. After over 30 years of living in apartments, I had really internalized the belief that keeping the sidewalk clean of snow and ice was always someone else’s job. Building managers, store owners, doormen and landlords would always come out and shovel a path in front of their own little fiefdom with varying levels of success and/or effort. It was a built in cost of an apartment or part of the maintenance contract. I wasn’t expected to fix the heat in the building either. I do remember having a twinge of guilt as I ran outside to play in the snow in Brooklyn though — running right past my landlord as they shoveled the sidewalk. Only a small twinge though as it was their house. I was just a tenant to them and so be it, not shoveling was part of the agreement.

I suspect this is the same attitude many web designers and developers have towards accessibility on the web. It’s someone else’s job. It’s expected to be included in the plan, the service, the template, the theme, the subscription.

The Switch

Of course, this all changes when you find yourself as the owner instead of the tenant. When we bought our house, all of a sudden it became my responsibility to keep the sidewalk free of snow, safe and accessible. Now, of course, I had shoveled snow before. For my family growing up or for my homeowner and car owning friends. Even one famous night with the band where we had to shovel to get the van out, shovel to get a parking spot at the gig and then returned home to find the snow plows had…blocked in the driveway…again…and we had to shovel a final time to get the van into the driveway. Talk about DIY punk rock. A snow shovel became part of our music gear.

The Reasons

Now it occurs to me that the reasons I’m diligent about shoveling now, mirror the rationale followed by many businesses. The first reason? Financial pressure. When we moved into the house, the previous owner told us that if we didn’t shovel the sidewalk, the city would fine us. And while we didn’t quite take his word as honest or legitimate, we did know that he was cheap and lazy, so the probability that he had left the sidewalk uncleared until the city finally noticed was quite high. So yes, financial incentive is often the first way companies (and homeowners) become interested in accessibility. I’ve often repeated to other designers the mantra, “Don’t get the company sued.” I’ve been on calls with the lawyers and it’s not fun. And much like with shoveling, it’s better to get it right at the beginning rather than attempting to fix it later. Trying to chip away at four inches of ice with a plastic shovel is not an accessibility strategy.

The second reason is that it becomes personal. Someone at the company uses assistive technology for the web. Alternatively, someone (often a new hire) at the company speaks up and asks why the website isn’t accessible. Likewise, someone in your family, your neighborhood uses assistive technology to walk, to see, to hear. The adage is true for a reason — we will all be disabled eventually. We will all be less able as we age and we will all need some assistance — a walker, a wheelchair, a cane, eye glasses, hearing aid, etc. As I shovel, I think about my father-in-laws using their wheelchairs and walkers to navigate the world. Heck, I even think of the mean old nuns in the nursing home up the street. No one wants a dead nun on the sidewalk outside their house. Better to slog out into the sub zero temperatures to shovel the sidewalk than face that nightmare. For businesses, this is where financial incentive mixes with the personal aspect: why create/ignore barriers to potential customers? You want to make that sale, right? I shovel to make sure the fire hydrant is clear and accessible. To make sure it’s visible when firefighters are rushing to save lives.

The third reason is pride of ownership. In terms of shoveling, I’m influenced by my years as a pedestrian. I bought my first car in my 40s, so my entire life has been walking. Walking the streets for decades will form a high level of empathy and strong opinions on what makes a sidewalk accessible. For example, clearing a single shovel width of snow from the sidewalk is only a first step. It’s the epitome of accurate, but not adequate; conformant but not accessible. Why? People walk both ways on the sidewalk. When they meet, once must move over and only one person can use the clear path. The other is forced to risk the snow, the ice, the cold. Ideally, you shovel the entire width of the sidewalk, allowing people to pass each other without risking falls. Pride also means going the extra step. Clearing the snow is great, but what about ice? You may include ALT text, but is it valuable? Relevant? Or just performative? I add salt (paw safe) to the sidewalk to prevent ice from building up, because I’ve watched people fall and I’ve slipped and skidded down the hill. Heck, I once skated off the sidewalk and into traffic. It scared a school bus driver so much that she stopped and gave me a ride down the hill.

It’s also worth noting that accessibility isn’t a single season. It isn’t a one and done. It’s constant maintenance and continuous improvement. In the summer, I trim the hedge so that it doesn’t overgrow and narrow the sidewalk. I cut it back so that the giant left turn warning sign is visible; so that cars don’t miss the turn and smash into my neighbors front yard. In the fall, I rake the leaves and pine needles to clear the sidewalk to prepare for the coming snow. No need to shovel both leaves and snow come winter. Better to take each in turn. It’s also never perfect. Your neighbor might need help. You might be out of town when a storm hits and that’s okay. You can pick up where you left off.

Finally, shoveling is a signal. Accessibility is a signal. It’s a sign post indicating the world you want to live in. We can each create the world we want. You’ve seen examples before. The neighborhood where all the houses have shoveled the sidewalk but one house hasn’t. Or worse, the reverse where only one house on the block has shoveled the sidewalk. How does that make you feel? There’s a certain level of monkey see, monkey do and you can be the first. You can show the way. Me? I want to live in an accessible world. I want the sidewalk to be clear. I want the walk to be easy. For you and for me.