This week on The Deep Dive: What Spirit Halloween can teach us about city design, a look back at the originators of Frutiger Aero, love isn’t dead but we do need to start being so serious when it comes to celebrity relationships, cable TV is gone forever and streaming has trapped us inside media bubbles, and the story of a creepy crawly ghoul named Ron DeSantis (cue distant screams).

Don't forget to check out all the newsletter-recommended video essays to date in The Deep Dive’s YouTube playlist!

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URBANISM

How Spirit Halloween Transforms Strip Malls Into Vibrant Wonderlands by CityNerd (10:44)

It’s easy to turn your nose up at the Spirit Halloween locations that spring up every year toward the end of summer at the gravesite of your former local furniture store. But what if the Spirit Halloween model can save our strip malls? In this video, CityNerd investigates the Spirit Halloween phenomenon and the retail brand’s impressive ability to transport customers to a fantastical new world solely through resources that are already available to them. How does Spirit Halloween hold a mirror up to the way US cities are designed? And what can the retail industry learn from its unique model?

DESIGN

Finding the Origins of Popular Frutiger Aero Images (ft. kylie) by ShaiiValley (20:51)

Frutiger Aero is an aesthetic that was popular in the early 2000s, defined by glossy textures, rounded shapes, green-blue hues, and an overall optimistic outlook on technological innovation. Even if you don’t know what Frutiger Aero is, you know what Frutiger Aero is and just a glance at an image representing the aesthetic can trigger waves of nostalgia. In this video, ShaiiValley and kylie dig beneath the surface of the design style that’s taken social media by storm, locating the original versions of the internet’s most popular Frutiger Aero images. From turn-of-the-century Korean stock photos to digitally generated liminal spaces to buildings that are both older and newer than you’d think, Frutiger Aero is all around – if you know where to look for it.

Presented by

Search Party: Chaos at the Park

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