Noiseland Arcade

One of the interesting difficulties of the Simpsons is that after 20 years on the air, some of the cultural landmarks change. For example, the arcade where Bart used to fritter away a lot of his time; arcades are thin on the ground these days, now that everybody has a Playstation or XBox or whatever.

But anyway, I like the name, so here it is, the Noiseland Arcade...


My idea for this is that Noiseland is a place that opened up in the early days of videogames, shortly after the advent of the ubiquitous Pac-Man. They have never replaced or updated their signage, so Noiseland's logo is a good 30+ years out of date.

For the name "Noiseland", I hand-built my own lettering, based heavily on fonts from the Bauhaus School, particularly Blippo and Pump, with a tri-line design. The "Arcade" part is set in Braggadocio, which is a knock-of of Futura Black, another one of the Bauhaus designs.

The colors are pure '70s cheese, intended to contrast with the completely unauthorized Pac-Man logo that helps to further date the design as a relic.

It's a little sad to think that when The Simpsons premiered, this design would have only been about 10 years out of date; now it might as well be from Renaissance. Sigh. I'm old.

Kodos for President

I happened to catch a rerun of the Halloween Treehouse of Terror episode from 1996 yesterday, and was struck by the profound political commentary, and a bit disheartened that Groening & Co. were clearly shouting into the wind a dozen years ago.

When the Presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole are revealed to be the monstrous aliens Kang & Kodos (yeah, yeah, "spoilers." It's from 13 years ago. There has to be a statute of limitations on this stuff....), they explain that it doesn't make any difference; "it's a two-party system... you have to vote for one of us." When a spectator suggests voting for a third-party candidate, the aliens taunt, "go ahead, throw your vote away! MWUAHAHAHAHAHA!"

After Inauguration Day, when Kang has won the election and the aliens have enslaved the population and put them to work building massive installations, Homer explains "don't blame me; I voted for Kodos!" as if the result would have been at all different.

So I sat down and whipped out a bumper sticker....


The squid symbol is based on the elephant and donkey icons that get trotted out every four years. I reversed the colors to make it feel alien; usually the red is on the bottom part. This alien nature is further emphasized by putting the star off-center.

The text is set in Simian, a font family from House Industries. I've used it before on other designs because it's a nice and interesting sans serif gothic that comes in three weights: Orangutan (Light), Chimpanzee (Medium), and Gorilla (Bold). I added a 12° skew since the font doesn't come in an oblique.

My First Tattoo

This one goes past pretty quickly on the show, but I liked the sound of it.

In the episode "My Sister, My Sitter" (season 8), Marge and Homer go to the grand re-opening of the Springfield Squidport and leave Lisa in charge of Bart and Maggie, with dire consequences.

Meanwhile, at the Squidport, which is one of those formerly-skeevy industrial areas that's been gentrified into a yuppie retail/entertainment complex, Mr. & Mrs. Simpson survey the new shops and restaurants, one of which is a tattoo parlor where a bunch of the Springfield children are admiring one kid's new ink.

As usual, the signage in the episode is fairly perfunctory, plain block lettering with a passing effort at a graphic. In this case, the word "First" is emblazoned on a ribbon traversing a heart, in a classic tattoo motif. I decided to go in a different direction, playing up the idea that it's a parlor specializing in young customers (which is certainly illegal just about everywhere in the US).


I decided to use a childish handwriting font (Lemonade Bold) for "My First", with bright pastel coloring, and a spiky medieval font (Ironwood) for "Tattoo". The red-to-black gradient fill and multiple outlines add a little edge of menace in keeping with the usual tattoo aesthetic.