We Bring the Joys of Travel Home

Encountering the unexpected at every turn. Discovering new sights, sounds, flavors, customs, and people. Experiencing for yourself what makes a place unique. These are the joys of travel.

The problem: how to keep those joys alive at home. Instead of just remembering a place, how can we reexperience it? And can we learn to experience our everyday environment in new ways, finding the joys of travel there, too?

Our solution is the Iconic Cities series of art print posters.

The Iconic Cities are not typical souvenir travel posters. What makes them special is that they are designed to be experiential. Just like the cities themselves, these posters invite you to step in to discover and explore the hundreds of details that build the distinctive character of a place.

Our customers tell us our posters are absorbing. They love the experience of “getting lost” in their favorite cities all over again. And each time they immerse themselves in the details, they are surprised to discover something new, something not noticed or encountered before. Each viewing is different, depending on where you start and where your turn next, just like a stroll through the place itself. 

Experiential poster design is not done easily, or quickly. Iconic New York, the first poster in the series, spent nearly 3 years on the drawing board! 

For each poster, we start by building a comprehensive database of the city’s landmarks, buildings, bridges, parks, cultural institutions, writers, artists, celebrities, sports teams, food, festivals, flora, fauna, legends, lore, and trivia. Then, for each line-item in the database, our design team creates an icon. Finally, our creative director assembles all the icons into an imaginative mosaic that forms the shape of the city itself, being careful to respect the relative positions of the landmarks.

Our labor-intensive methods may never make us the highest seller of travel posters, but that’s OK. We knew from the beginning that we were entering a highly competitive online market saturated with mass-produced posters and wall art. But we saw that no one was offering a product like ours, built from long hours of painstaking research, designed by hand in exquisite detail, produced with high-quality papers and inks, and printed in limited editions. We remain committed to sustainability in our business, using only soy-based inks, FSC-certified papers, and recyclable packaging in the production and shipping of our posters.

Rafael, Greg, and Minal are the 3 partners at Alfalfa New York. For us, high craftsmanship and attention to detail are what it’s all about. For our customers, we believe our approach creates the ultimate value. Experiential design makes our posters an evergreen source of joy and happiness. With every look, they engage and reward your curiosity, bringing the joys of travel right into your home. One customer in Canada had this to say:

I ordered an Iconic Central Park poster for my dear friends. Excitement abounds in their home today as the poster arrived. They are so thrilled with it. I feel like a hero having given them so much joy. I knew they loved Central Park but did not correctly estimate the impact of this special gift. This [the pandemic] has been a difficult time for them, and I guess those happy memories of adventures in New York lifted their spirits immensely. Sometimes you never hear about the results of your creative endeavors . . . this time you did.

New York City is full of people who come from “no place special”—or so they think. We are perfect examples. Rafael is from a desert town in Mexico. Greg is from a small city in Ohio. And Minal is from an urban center in India. When each of us arrived in New York years ago, we loved the myriad ways it was wonderfully different from home. But in the end, the experience also gave us greater appreciation for where we’re from. And that’s because the best thing about traveling—and for us, the related process of creating these posters—is that it teaches you to encounter the details of your surroundings, whether abroad or at home, with child-like curiosity and delight. 

Rafael tells the story of his first trip away from home as a boy. He and his family took the night bus to visit relatives in the north, near the border. It’s cooler to travel through the Sonoran Desert by night, and you can sleep away the long hours. But for 9-year-old Rafael, there was no sleep. Looking out the bus window, his eyes were as big as an owl’s. He was determined to catch glimpses of the towns along the route he knew only by name: Navojoa, Obregón, Bácum, Guaymas, Empalme, Hermosillo, etc. In the dark, there wasn’t much to see that could distinguish one from the others, but it was thrilling find something, even if it were just the lights and a road sign. Rafael could say he had been there and recall a flavor of it. 

We believe that every place is special and full of wonders if you look with child-like curiosity and delight.