This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

You know when you notice something for the first time and suddenly it's everywhere.

My friend Julie Shapiro has a thing for personified teeth on dentist signs, where the cartoon tooth often has a smile and teeth of its own.

I always notice these now.

That in anthropomorphize pigs who are selling themselves as barbecue, that

always gives me the creeps, and one day I notice that sign stores, you know the ones that print

homemade banners and posters for you, always without fail have the ugliest collection of signs with

horrible fonts in their front windows. Now I can't pass one on the street without

taking a picture to document the ironic tragedy. Lots of things are like this for all of us on staff.

We can get obsessed with tiny little design flourishes,

and this is what happened to producer Avery Trufflement.

It was just a shape.

A basic little shape.

It's rendered in concrete on a building by my house.

It's patterned in an office doorway down the street.

Here's what it looks like.

Imagine a simple stylized four-leaf clover flattened with no stem, very symmetrical.

I took a walk and I found this shape in ten different places.

It was embroidered on bedding, it was plastered on wallpaper, it was patterned in a public garbage can.

You'll see it anywhere you see great Gothic Revival building, the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York,

the Washington Cathedral. You will also see it in domestic

architecture in the great as they're called cottages down in Newport, Rhode Island.

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