Logos and Peace Signs

I work at T.G.I. Friday's on Newbury Street as a hostess. Newbury is the 'Rodeo Drive' of Boston, some would say. (Though I doubt Rodeo Drive has a Fridays). Upscale restaurants and shops as well as trendy shoppers willing to spend good amounts of money fill the street. It's a pretty exciting place to be on the weekends. Door to door are stores such as Urban Outfitters, Jasmine Sola, The North Face, Puma and Diesel, and restaurants such as Armani Cafe, Kashmir (Indian), Croma, a really cool Tapas place and finally Stephanie's On Newbury.

Any Newbury Street shopper is familiar with Stephanie's. They have a $15 minimum just to eat on the patio. Their interior design is beautiful with dim lighting, fireplaces, and elegant tablecloths. But their logo? Not so much. You would think that a place as nice as Stephanie's would have a well-designed logo. I often stare at their logo because Friday's directly faces Stephanie's across the street. It never occurred to me until the middle of this summer that their logo is awful. I have seen many logos that have maybe one letter flipped around or changed, and this can sometimes be a neat look-but only if it's done well. Stephanie's is not done well. The first E in Stephanie's is a small capital letter, then the rest of the word continues as lower case. It just doesn't work for me. Then the 'on' is italicized, which is OK, but I think would flow better if the whole word Stephanie's looked like 'Newbury'-all in small caps. Whenever I look at the logo (usually when the business at Friday's is slow) I pretty much cringe.

The only other thing I had for this week is a big wooden sculpture of a hand making the peace sign in the Park Street T station on the red line. This station is a pretty big one because it is where the red and green lines intersect. The sculpture is up towards the ceiling, and kind of random. I just glanced up and there it was! I felt that even though it was pretty unexpected and caught me off guard, it was kind of nice.