Paul Shaw walked New York photographing lettering. Hand-painted grocery signs. Carved stone above bank entrances. Gold leaf on office doors. He cataloged vernacular typography the way a botanist catalogs wildflowers, block by block, borough by borough. The project was called Fun City.

What made it land wasn’t the type specimens. It was the obsession. Shaw wasn’t surveying a field. He was living inside one. The photographs accumulated into something larger than documentation. They became a world, his world, built from decades of looking at the same city through the same lens. You could feel the person behind every frame. The range of lettering was enormous. The eye was singular.

That’s the test I keep coming back to.

I call it the Fun City Test, and it asks one question: is the world you’ve built so vivid and so obviously yours that people want to be inside it?

This is different from asking whether the work is good. Good is necessary but insufficient. You can produce excellent work that belongs to no one. Clean, competent, indistinguishable from the next person’s clean, competent output. The Fun City Test catches that. It doesn’t measure quality. It measures presence.

I apply it to my own site constantly. petersalvato.com covers enterprise software, AI governance, glyph systems, cooking infrastructure, a novel, DJ culture. On paper that sounds scattered. The test is whether it feels scattered when you’re inside it. Whether the range reads as one person’s actual life or as someone who couldn’t pick a lane. I think the answer changes depending on how well the connective tissue holds. When the site works, the range is the point. When it doesn’t, the range is the problem. Same material, different room.

I applied it to Aiden Jae, the jewelry brand I built with Randi. The gold, the pollinators, the wool felt pouches sewn in-house. Every touchpoint had to feel like her world. Not a jewelry brand in the abstract. Her jewelry brand. The packaging concepts I designed, the recycled 9k gold, the donation to pollinator research with every purchase. If you removed the logo and the name, could you still tell it was Aiden Jae? That’s the test. And it has teeth, because “could be anyone’s jewelry brand” is the default. Most brands live there. The ones that pass the Fun City Test are the ones where the founder’s obsession is legible in every detail.

Encore is twelve years on one platform. The Fun City Test there isn’t about the software. It’s about whether the work feels like it belongs to someone who cares about this particular problem in this particular way. Twelve years of solving the same class of problem, scaffolding for dev teams on one side, ease for end users on the other. The accumulation either builds a world or it doesn’t.

Here’s where the test gets uncomfortable. I’ve seen work that’s technically superior to mine fail this test completely. Polished portfolios, impressive client lists, zero sense of a person behind any of it. And I’ve seen rougher work pass easily, because the maker’s fingerprint was on every surface. The test doesn’t care about polish. It cares about whether someone is home.

Shaw didn’t set out to build a brand or position himself in a market. He set out to look at lettering, and decades of looking accumulated into a world that was unmistakably his.

So the question, and I think it’s worth sitting with: if someone walked through everything you’ve made, would they know whose city they were in?