My bus bumps past Mad Max-style homes, like Super 8 motels behind medieval walls, down a road covered in ornate signs. This is Der’a Adam Khel, a town by the Afghan border in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, devoted to the manufacture of counterfeit firearms, where men labor with hand tools to craft knock-off weaponry for the world’s wars.

It reached 117° while I was wandering the Northwest Frontier Province, just a year before 9/11, whose repercussions have closed this area for most Westerners. Open fighting has broken out between government forces and the locals around Der’a. In retrospect, I am uneasy about the morality of traveling so casually to a place like this, but I am grateful to have these images to contemplate.

“Vernacular” design has been thoroughly discussed, dissected and ripped off. But I still embrace the richness and power of design work like these signs, made by hand thousands of miles from Madison Avenue and Bushwick.