Santa Monica graphic designer David Yoon is a man with vision. The kind of vision that takes the bustling, clunky streets of LA and turns them into intimate culs-de-sac like one would find in Rome, or maybe Paris.
For NS:LA, his current project, Yoon toys with the idea of changing the tempo of an entire city by changing the feel of a main thoroughfare or two. To be more specific, he makes the wider mega-roads more narrow. By spending an afternoon photoshopping and digital manipulating photos of LA streets, he found that smaller details, such as tiny street side cafes, that were once swallowed by the sheer size of the road, were now more noticeable, creating a neighborhood feel similar to wandering side street in Europe.
"I'd just gotten back from a vacation wandering the tiny streets of Paris and now found myself idly counting lanes: one, two, three, four...five? Five lanes -- almost half the width of the 405!" notes Yoon on the project's website. "The difference was enough to make me wonder: could the entire mood of a neighborhood depend on something as simple as street width?"
While he remains focused on the streets of Los Angeles for right now, Yoon is currently taking suggestions for new cities to apply his special brand of narrow magic to.
Yoon is no stranger to seeking out the small stuff. His last project, Microlawns, is a funny look at the teeny tiny sections of grass that pop up around urban areas.
