Fitzgeralds

Being downtown for an extended time, I am walking past this facade a lot. I haven't been in a position to take a photo myself, so I have scooped this pic from here, thank you to whoever is responsible.

Fitzgeralds was a statewide department store chain that was just ubiquitous in my life growing up. The Burnie Fitzies took up half a block of town, and I bought most of my clothes and records there.

Later after I moved to Hobart I worked at the ad agency who did all of Fitzies TV, press and catalogues; where I made my notorious typo in a cosmetics ad; “come in and talk to one of our beauty conslutants” which was 100% accidental.


Fun fact; for a time there was a Fitzgeralds at Forest Hills in Melbourne! But shortly after that the parent company based in Adelaide rebranded the whole lot as Harris Scarfe and the whole chain fell into a bit of a snooze. The Hobart store is a poorly-patronised rump of what was once there.

If you have any great memories of Fitzies I'd love to hear them. I liked how you could buy a leg of lamb, a Soundgarden CD and a six pack of Rio underdaks not just under one roof, in fact inside a 10m radius.

Back to the sign; the shape of these characters are fascinating. That's a G in the middle below. Talk about minimal.

And look at this R below. Its common to build an R from the P but this is brutal!

Birthday - part B2 (the prequel): wayfinding

I just remembered a sign I saw at Melbourne Airport. Alex, who was picking me up, is an information designer, and very interested in wayfinding, which "…encompasses all of the ways in which people and animals orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place." - thanks Wikipedia. So I needed to go to the toilet, but was running late to be picked up by Alex out the front of the terminal. The toilets down the long, long concourse were all closed for cleaning anyway.

I was about to go down an escalator, and through one-way security barrier, when I saw a laser printed A4 sign taped to the escalator.

THE TOILETS ARE BEHIND YOU
AT GATES 2, 6 AND 10.
THERE ARE NO TOILETS DOWNSTAIRS!
EXCEPT...

And that's where I stopped reading, as my momentum was carrying me down the escalator and there were people behind me. At the bottom I turned right and there were the toilets, where they have always been. I wish I had stopped to read what the exception at the end was.