Global Graphica

The cover of issue number two of the Green Soccer Journal, an arty, beautifully-designed and intelligent “football” magazine published in U.K., features the player Patrick Viera, a former French national team member who has played for several major clubs, including Arsenal, Inter-Milan and Manchester City .

Very fresh artwork by the artist Dain on Ludlow Street, on the block between Hester and Canal streets, in the Lower East Side of New York City.

Global Graphica has been settling back into NYC after an excellent, fun and incredibly productive trip to Berlin. We met a lot of awesome people, went to a lot great places and saw tons of cool things while we were staying in the German capital. (We also had some remarkably good coffee and a few beers along the way.)

Our trip and the Global Graphica Berlin Project would not have been possible without the local knowledge, logistical support, and creative advice of a lot of great folks. So Global Graphica gives a big, mighty shout-out and “THANK YOU!” to Imre, Gero, Yui, Angelo, Adam, Sandra, Umbom, Carlo, Cory, Yasmindo, Claude, Claire, Ben, Damian and Haydee, Eric, and the folks at Keyser Soze, Casa Camper, and Bonanza Coffee Heroes. Danke!

We’ll be continuing to post images to the site from the Berlin Project in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned.

Tschüss!

Van

In 1995 the Bulgarian-French artist couple of Christo and Jeanne-Claude  wrapped the German parliament building or reichstag in polypropylene fabric. A billboard in the Brandenburger Tor U-Bahn station in Berlin displays an image of the epic artwork.

There’s an entertaining photo essay titled “The Mullets of Medellin” in the second issue of the Green Soccer Journal, an intelligent, refreshingly creative English magazine devoted to football culture. The feature has 22 photos of soccer players from Medellin, Colombia who sport the short-in-the-front-long-in-the-back hairstyle. The essay was written by Rainbow Nelson with photography by Stefan Ruiz. Great stuff.

This video is from a few months ago, but it’s awesome nonetheless: A real-life version of the popular mobile game Angry Birds, shot in Barcelona as part of a T-Mobile viral campaign.

The minimal, beautifully designed clock in a Berlin U-Bahn (subway) station.

Poster in the Berlin neighborhood of Kruezberg for the “Temptation to be Good” art exhibition of works by artist Mercedes Helnwein at the Pool Gallery.

Some more station name signs from the Berlin U-Bahn. We love how each station’s signs are distinct in typography, design, spacing and color.

Street art in Berlin: From the platform of Eberswalder-strasse U-Bahn Station, you can see a massive mural of a cartoon bear running across the side of an apartment building in Prenzlauer-Berg. Love it.

As noted in a previous post, the symbol of the city of Berlin is a little bear.

A large collection of arty bears statues in the Ku’Damm area of Charlottenberg in Berlin. The figures are part of the United Bears Project and are dotted throughout Berlin. The project was launched in German capital in 2002. There are 140 bears in the city and these have traveled around the world to five continents to promote global peace initiatives. Each of the bears represents a country or city. The bear itself is significant for Berlin as it is the symbol of the city and appears on its flag and has been integrated into various logos and designs.

An exhibition about the Berlin Wall at the site of the former Checkpoint Charlie border-crossing in Kruezberg near Mitte shows documentary photographs of the late American artist Keith Haring famously painting the wall in the 1980s. Some of the images are from the archives of the former stasi or East German secret police.

Official municipal bike-parking signage with the coat-of-arms logo of Charlottenberg-Wilmersdorf in Berlin.

Mysterious logo stencil street art in the Hackescher Market area of Mitte, Berlin.

The massive, spacious, glass-sheathed central train station or hauptbahnhof in Berlin.

The diverse selection of daily newspapers and magazines in the rooftop cafe at the Casa Camper hotel in Berlin. Among the wonderful selection of titles: the International Herald Tribune, Die Welt, Berliner Zeitung, Financial Times,  Electronic Beats, Mitteschon.

Large street-art painting of Marlon Brando’s iconic image from the Francis Ford Coppola film “The Godfather” in the Hackescher Market area of Mitte, Berlin.

We stumbled upon this super-colorful apartment building in the western part of Kreuzberg in Berlin. With a few coats of paint, an ordinarily drab and plain building has been transformed into a local landmark.

The haunting “West” and “Ost” (“East”) mirrors in the epic grand staircase at the Martin Gropius Bau art museum in Mitte, in Berlin. The museum’s location is on a street that was once the border along which the infamous Berlin Wall ran. The Wall was literally a stone’s throw from the where the “Ost” mirror now hangs.

This funny, clever billboard for the German energy company Vattenfall in Berlin incorporates a ladder and a life-size mannequin of uniformed worker climbing it.