Good Signs and Bad Signs in the Bay Area

The most infamous bad signs in the Bay are the billboards entering SF. But good and bad signs are everywhere — if you know where to look.

Good Signs and Bad Signs in the Bay Area
People walk past IB’s cheesesteak shop in Berkeley on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025. (Estefany Gonzalez/COYOTE Media Collective)

There are a lot of signs in the Bay Area. Good ones include the C&H Pure Cane Sugar sign over Crockett; bad ones include that string of anti-abortion billboards in West Oakland that try to tell you how many fingernails a fetus has.

What rubric am I using here? Glad you asked: The best sign in the country is Trenton, New Jersey’s “Trenton makes – the world takes” because it is beautiful, brutal, and passive-aggressive; also because it is most easily viewed from a passing train. This is the standard by which all big signs must be judged. 

Good sign: I saw this at a riverside park up in Guerneville, while a group of kayakers drifted past me playing Everlast’s 1998 hit “What It’s Like” on portable speakers. The five-minute variation in closing times, along with the Kinko’s lamination job, make for a very pleasing combination of jankiness and attention to detail. We, the citizenry, have got a right to that five extra minutes, and those five minutes matter to someone in office.

Good sign (Daniel Lavery/COYOTE Media Collective)

Bad sign: On Lakeshore Avenue, hanging over what might for all I know be a perfectly serviceable restaurant, which I will nonetheless cheerfully avoid for the rest of my life, is a sign for “I.B.’S Cheesesteaks.” 

To the casual observer this looks almost exactly like Irritable Bowel Syndrome Cheesesteaks. To make matters worse, they offer a “Surf & Turf IBS Cheesesteak.” A more unlovely phrase cannot be said to exist in the language, except for maybe "Crohn's Disease Cincinnati Chili.”

Bad sign (Daniel Lavery/COYOTE Media Collective)

Good sign: It’s not precisely a good idea, but it is a very good sign. White and yellow text over an auburn background? Arbitrary quotation marks over a close-up image of a big wet eye? This is a labor of deranged love. 

Horses are not unconditionally accepting; they are cliqueish, dramatic, easily offended, and quite often passionately afraid of leaves. Any quotation which has been falsely attributed to Marilyn Monroe can be used to accurately describe a horse: “I’m selfish, impatient, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I’m out of control, and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” 

That said, if I had $300 to spare, I would be delighted to spend it on this horse Enneagram session.  

Good sign (Daniel Lavery/COYOTE Media Collective)

Bad sign: This one, from a storefront that members of the public can neither enter nor patronize, right next to Beauty’s Bagels* on Telegraph Avenue, infuriates me. I want to be allowed in here! Look at all those little teacups and apothecary cabinets and paper lanterns. I want to wander around inside and not buy anything! Don’t tell me you’re hiding in the back, enjoying your tasteful little Miyazaki studio setup, planning on making a tea room out of this someday, and that I can’t come in. Why would you go to all the trouble of renting and filling a storefront when I, the well-meaning pedestrian, cannot even come in and browse? And that line about “tea room coming soon” is a fig leaf, I can tell you, because I’ve been passing this place for almost a year now and it is not one day closer to opening up a tea room, I can tell you that much.  

*Now, I think, “Wise Son’s Beauty’s Bagels,” in a sort of Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse situation. 

Bad sign (Daniel Lavery/COYOTE Media Collective)

Bad sign: Spotted at a children’s science center I took my son to a few months back. There’s a little pretend aquarium station, where the kids can put on plastic smocks and protective footwear and slop water around. 

My son is not really big enough for “pretend science” to be of interest to him, but still, If these community shoes need to be disinfected at all, doing it once a week cannot possibly be enough. I’d prefer no sign at all to this. I don’t need to know the details of your Crocs hygiene regimen unless those details are reassuring; otherwise it’s better for me to remain happily ignorant. 

Bad sign (Daniel Lavery/COYOTE Media Collective)

Bad sign: From a Berkeley library. The sign itself is fine, but the snotty little ‘gotcha’ graffito is the worst kind of snide, do-gooder oneupmanship I’ve seen in the wild. “Oh, you’re providing patrons with free resources? Why haven’t you also provided us with a coded script to rehearse in advance?” Just go ask the librarian for what you need in a quiet voice! That’s plenty discreet. They don’t need to provide you with some shameful euphemism. 

Bad sign (Daniel Lavery/COYOTE Media Collective)

Good sign: At Chabot Space Center. The orb’s memetic heyday is a few years old at this point, but it’s still a perfectly good concept. Why not consider this turbulent orb?

Good sign (Daniel Lavery/COYOTE Media Collective)

Bad sign: I’ve seen these fliers up on a lot of telephone poles in Temescal and Piedmont, and it’s a great example of a perfectly reasonable concept destroyed by the most deliberately unpleasant execution. The combination of the weeping cartoon figures and “In search of a few more friends (strictly platonic, sickos)” puts the viewer on the back foot immediately. I came over to see if you were okay because you drew yourself crying, and you’re already calling me a sicko because you think I’m trying to hit on you? Why are you putting all that on me if you want me to be your friend? What’s the matter with you? Why, in your own advertisement for friendship, are you depicting yourself as a snivelling mess beset by terrifying sexual aggressors? Now you’ll never know if I like cooking, too. 

Bad sign (Daniel Lavery/COYOTE Media Collective)

We’ve all got to look at signs; if they can’t be useful, they should at least be beautiful. Failing that, they should at least be upsetting in an interesting or novel fashion.

 Here, we begin a sporadically recurring feature in which I’ll do my best to provide a rating for all the signs in the Bay Area them, but obviously that might take a while. Please send me pictures of some of the signs from your neighborhood if you want to speed up the process. No sign too big or too small.

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