Make your own Japanese shop banners.

These textile shop banners are common in Japan. Given how easy they are to install and how much more beautiful they are than typical signage, it seems strange that they haven’t been widely copied. They can easily be adapted for interior decor, too, not just exterior purposes. These two examples are from restaurants – the yellow one is in Matsumoto City and the blue is from a specialty eel restaurant in Tokyo’s Asakusa district (I took these). Their bottom corners are held down either with iron weights or simple hooks screwed into the sidewalk. The banners have the dual function of advertising the shop or restaurant as well as hiding bland areas of architecture or unsightly objects – here the blue fabric panel also serves to hide empty beer crates awaiting pickup. They sometimes also function as a windbreak and for privacy over a door . You could easily rig this up at home for many purposes – as room dividers for interiors, or as space dividers outside for carports, patios or yards. Even plain or printed outdoor canvas would work, and the panels could just as easily be hung vertically – they don’t have to be pitched at an angle. They could also be pitched at a 90-degree angle from a wall, the way it’s done in done in Soho, or used to be, for galleries. Anything other than those sandwich boards that clog Vancouver sidewalks and make walking under awnings in the rain impossible.

(I couldn’t find an example of the skinny vertical gallery banners that almost extend to ground level, but you know the ones I mean)