Vegetarian restaurants are becoming more mainstream and, inadvertently or not, distinctive branding and signage helps them stand out from the herd.

It Ain’t Meat, Babe

You can take their word for it, this meat-free eatery in Tokyo’s Kinshicho district is, er, as meat-free as they come. Mind you, they’re not stating It’s Delicious, only that It’s Vegetable. At least it’s not Mineral. Flickr member non-euclidean photography captured the above Taiwanese restaurant’s front facade and sign in June of 2008.

Pot Pies?

Best thing about the Herbal (not “Horrible”) Pizzeria? When calling in an order, you never have to specify “no anchovies, please”. That said, what the heck is an herbal pizza? Try the Scarborough Fair, topped with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Looking ahead, this shop’s already got a running start on the budding CBD-infused pizza sector. What’s more: they work with Gold Bee to ensure that they only use the finest CBD oil to infuse into their slices of pizza goodness! Goodbye ham & pineapple, hello hemp & pineapple express! Flickr member Jeff snapped the venerable vegetarian pizza parlor in early 2011.

Oh Yah

Chicago-area foodies oughta check out this place, recommended by Flickr member Eric Allix Rogers as “still the best vegan soul food joint in South Shore.” While such glowing reviews are a good sign for any restaurant, this one has some bad issues with its sign. Not the tilted and/or missing letters… they evoke a certain sense of charm. Nope, we’re referring to the font used on the sign just below. Pro tip: a restaurant that offers meals sans meat should present signage sans Comic Sans.

Goulash Vegas

What happens in Budapest stays in Budapest, whether one’s Hungary or not. Welcome to Las Vegan’s, a rather inconspicuous dining kiosk that probably won’t make anyone’s to-do Liszt. Flickr member Sharon Hahn Darlin took a gamble on this cutely-named diner on the Danube in June of 2018.

Milkshaken, not Stirred

Vegetarian sushi is one of those uncomfortable conjunctions like jumbo shrimp, plastic glass and military intelligence. Still, you’ve gotta give Emeryville, CA’s Sushi Village props for advertising “vegetarian drinks”, whatever that means. We can guess what it doesn’t mean: no Bloody Marys, Moscow Mules, or anything made with Wild Turkey bourbon. Flickr member David Cohen felt intrigued enough by the concept to snap the store sign back in October of 2006.

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Packing and shipping artwork is a delicate and costly process, unless your intention is to create new pieces by allowing them to break along the way. Starting in 2005, artist Walead Beshty began a decade-long project, sending works of art to galleries around the world with an important twist: the key element of their creation happened in transit.

Beshty would construct glass boxes to fit inside the cardboard shipping containers, matching their interior dimensions (no padding or other protection). Curators then unpacked the finished works, usually cracked but not totally destroyed (being constructed from shatter-proof glass).

Each piece was given a descriptive name including the date of shipment, tracking number and box dimensions, then put on display (resulting in titles like: FedEx® Large Box ©2005 FEDEX 139751 REV 10/05 SSCC, Priority Overnight, Los Angeles-New York trk#795506878000, November 27-28, 2007). In some cases, the glass contents are reshipped, changing form again and again as they move between exhibitions.

The net result is a work that tells the story of its own travels, particularly a period between leaving the hands of the artist and being received by a museum or collector. The displays vary, but in some cases the battered boxes become pedestals for the finished sculptural displays.

But beyond this fixation with the story behind the art, there is another element that drove Beshty: the “perversity of a corporation owning a shape” – as it turns out, FedEx has managed to copyright the dimensions of their box designs.

“They are basically a unit of space owned by a corporation in which to ship objects,” explains the artist. This idea of a company being able to “own” an empty volume of air designed to transport goods seemed surreal, and was another factor motivating this unusual mobile art project.

An orange by any other name doesn’t taste the same, as the owners of these Trump-named but otherwise unaffiliated stores and business can truly attest.

Take Trump Tobacco, a Huntington Beach, California store selling cigars, cigarettes and smoking accessories. One wonders what The Donald would think of the 10-year-old business founded, owned and operated by Mohammad Yousefi, an Afghan-born U.S. citizen and card-carrying – well, business-card-carrying at least – Muslim. “I chose the name Trump thinking, he’s a rich guy with a lot of buildings, so maybe I’ll get something out of his name,” explained Yousefi. Er, maybe a little TMI, dude. Trump (and his lawyers) may have small hands but they’ve got very good ears.

Trump Hair

You’d think “TrUMp Hair” – their spelling – would be the ultimate Trump-named business but no: we’re saving that one for the very end. Even so, calling your beauty salon “Trump Hair” might be expected to provoke the odd giggle if it weren’t for the fact the hairstylist is located in Kanazawa, Ishikawa prefecture, Japan.

Distanced, literally, from the American political scene, this Japanese salon will likely escape the fate of the KingsHead Salon in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Trump Lawn & Land

You may have heard or seen reports of Trump supporters, fed up with having their lawn signs stolen, actually mowing the name “TRUMP” into their lawns. Don’t blame Trump Lawn and Land Company for such bio-expressive shenanigans; the York, PA family-owned landscaping business has been conducting an entirely different type of grass-roots organizing since 2004.

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A set of mathematical processes developed for use in crime-fighting and disease-tracking indicates that one already-suspected individual may indeed be the infamous graffiti and installation artist known as Banksy.

The approach of “geographical profiling” is often used to track down repeat offenders, serial criminals whose strikes began to form patterns that can be productively analyzed by experts and run through models by mathematicians.

The findings help paint a picture of probable places of residence and areas of everyday operation, criminal or otherwise, sometimes narrowing the search to an area as small as a few hundred square feet.

Steven Le Comber, a biologist at the the University of London, learned of geographic profiling from Kim Rossmo, a criminologist at Texas State University, growing interested because of potential applications for disease vector studies. The two then began teaming up to find both pathogens and people.

In this case, their modeling shows clusters of activity in London and Bristol based around 140 data points, specifically: sites of known or alleged works by Banksy. Their findings, reported in the Journal of Spatial Science, suggest a handful of addresses in London (a pub, park and residence) all associated with one Robin Gunningham.

Already suspected of being Banksy, Gunningham may yet be a ruse or a plant, but science suggests the individual is very likely connected with the artist, one way or another. As to the question: who is Banksy? We may never really know for sure.

From the abstract: “The pseudonymous artist Banksy is one of the UK’s most successful contemporary artists, but his identity remains a mystery. Here, we use a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) model of geographic profiling, a mathematical technique developed in criminology and finding increasing application within ecology and epidemiology, to analyse the spatial patterns of Banksy artworks in Bristol and London. The model takes as input the locations of these artworks, and calculates the probability of ‘offender’ residence across the study area. Our analysis highlights areas associated with one prominent candidate (e.g., his home), supporting his identification as Banksy.”