Down The Street Designs Has The Answer To City Living, And It Will Make You Smile
Angelenos and city dwellers alike will relate to Down the Street Designs’ looping takes on gentrification, Insta clichés posing as public art, the challenges of transportation, and the wait list at that new ramen spot. Paul Zappia and Colin Ozawa combined these illustrated gifs, collectively called “Everyday LA,” into a 45-second animated short. The humorous quick studies, all composed in a unifying palette of muted blues and oranges, are not so quick that they are devoid of LA’s daily ironies. In fact, conveying them, painted over with a we’re-all-in-this-together approach, was the designers’ entire point. See Metro, where a grandma stands with her walker while an apparently able-bodied large man takes up the row of reserved seats meant for her. And in Waitlist, the ramen restaurant’s host calls a name that doesn’t belong to anyone in the line of hungry people waiting outside.