When I found this stencil graffiti on the Victoriei Boulevard in Bucharest, near my home, I thought about writing an entry in my weblog about it and file it in the design section. Something about not using Helvetica to talk about the new. Then I was more impressed about the point it makes then about it's typography.

This is not a government sponsored social-marketing campaign, it's not a politically correct Academy of Art assignment. It's probably a kid who expresses his personal thoughts in a street language (that funky NIU is an approximative phonetical spelling of NEW) just for the hack of it.

And he thinks about a new Romania. Does it matter if he loves it or hates it? Maybe the wrong spelling is not about being funky but about mocking it? It's possible... but it doesn't matter. The keyword here is NEW.

Admit it!: this kids have their own country now, and their country is -- and if they're 14 it always was -- a country of Discovery Channel, Nike, Play Station, mobile phones and internet. Radiohead and manga, porn, graffiti, hip-hop, 24/7 TV and open borders. Money talk and junk food and jeans. No communism, no wooden language, no food tickets, no orwellian television restricted to some 2 stinking hours a day, no sick fucks beating people to death in the police basements for their political beliefs.

That's a different Romania than ours. We, the guys over 30-something, cannot escape yet the older memories of listening Radio Free Europe at night, and the Kent cigarettes pack kept in the house as a bribe for the next visit to the doctor. The rage and the sadness of the past turned us into grayscale pictures of ourselves.

But they have a normal life in a pretty much normal country. And their new Romania is getting bigger every day, while the old one shrinks and dies and falls apart. Or so I hope.