The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Bad design is all around us, but there's no bad design like bad election year design. Let's take a moment here to catalog some notable atrocities from recent election cycles, and then hang our heads in bipartisan shame. Offender number one is Bush/Cheney's militantly mindless logo from 2004; you can almost hear the designer making phlegmatic war movie sound effects to himself as he drafted it.

I was a street artist. If you prefer, I was a vandal. I started out, as most artists do, humbly. A can of russet Rustoleum with a couple of friends, scrawling vague leftist slogans on the abandoned railroad factory buildings in my hometown. Alleyway dumpsters and streetlit governmental properties were my first canvases. Then came small stencils: a tiny smokestack to spray on the outside of the asbestos-stuffed empty shells of our small town's industrial past. They were just little gestures, not even aesthetically pleasing, but to us it was the start of