26 September 2004
The Plan
For the next several weeks I will be looking at retro signage, but with the preference that the design actually be vintage rather than a modern attempt at aping an earlier style. I am especially interested in designs using early 20th century sans serif faces as evidence that there was a degree of diversity in outdoor type in the years before the helvetica monoculture took over.
In order to qualify for inclusion the sign should give the impression of having remained unchanged for several years, and responsibility for its design has been abandoned by the owner. As a result of this neglect, it has been allowed to go through years of looking dated and out of style until the current moment, where through nostalgia and the fact that the other signs on the street have left it behind, it has become eye-catching and unique once more.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 01:27 PM
27 September 2004
The Spot
A combination diner/bar in Harrisburg PA, the signage for The Spot mixes an unexpected variety of styles in ways that both clash, and create interesting (though presumably unintentional) harmonies.
The upper panel, with its repetition of bright orange dots on a stark white background draws your eye back and forth across the line, dragging them over the letters of the restaurant’s name, each nearly hidden in a separate dot. The characters themselves are a blocky sans-serif with interesting modulations of stroke on the O and the S which seems to bulge in its middle segment. However, against this harsh modern face, set in rows above and below the dots is an ornate serif with an almost victorian sculptedness to the line hight as it literally wraps around its corresponding dot. Despite these differences in style, it’s worth noting that they stumbled onto an echo with the sans-serif being modulated in weight, and the serif in size.
Below the main sign is a secondary banner that adds a third style to the mix. Offsetting the dark text on light background above, the name of the restaurant is repeated in a reversed out sans-serif face, but this one highly geometric in style. Aside from the capital T, it’s hard to find a single sharp corner on any of the characters, in marked contrast to the much heavier and more angular sans font above (contrast the sharp point on the P or the squared off edges applied to the S in the upper row).
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 06:42 PM
2 October 2004
Berklee
The berklee performance center at the tail end of back bay has one of the most 70s looking graphic identities in boston. It begins with the earthy color scheme, and reliance upon alternating stripes, but clearly the most striking element here is the typeface itself.
It has a somewhat schizophrenic character: one the one hand the letters without ascenders or descenders are highly geometric, with perfectly circular ‘o’ and ‘e’ characters, and even letters one would expect to be more restrained, such as the ‘r’ or ‘m’ have strong, rounded arcs as their most definitive features. In stark contrast to all this organic roundness are the perfectly straight and sharply inclined ascenders on the ‘b’ and ‘k’, and the boxy parallelogram formed in conjunction with the ‘l’. What makes that ‘kl’ combination stand out all the more is that all of the other letters with straight components also contain a rounded edge, either in the form of a descender, such as the ‘t’, or as a complete circle (the ‘b’ and ‘p’). Whether this makes for an interesting contrast or a jarring break to the flow of the rest of the line is left to the reader...
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 09:50 PM
Cambridgeport Saloon
An amazing combination of modernist elements that ends up referencing fonts ranging from bodoni to baskerville yielding a highly incoherent—yet nonetheless appealing—mess, this was found on the front of a dive bar on a dusty stretch of Mass Ave between MIT and the old Necco factory.
Though the bar itself is rather dingy, the sign suggests a degree of elegance: witness the graceful curves and inflections of stroke width on the S in ‘saloon’ and the use of a neoclassical double-O ligature which would be more at home chiseled into marble than painted onto the side of a pub (against a near-fluorescent shade of yellow at that).
But even beyond the dissonance between the formality of this text and its physical surroundings, even within the context of the sign there is friction. While the ‘saloon’ portion of the sign is set in a somewhat ornate serif, the upper pane aspires to a kind of utilitarian, tug-boat chic. The vaguely nautical lowercase characters still have the modernist characteristics of a vertical axis and combination of thick and thin strokes, however the chunkiness of the letters stands in stark contrast to the comparative grace of the caps in ‘saloon’. In addition, the capital C and P in ‘cambridgeport’ are quite different in character from both caps in the lower pane and the lowercase characters that follow them.
The choice to hyphenate ‘cambridgeport’ is further icing on the cake in this triumph of the vernacular in which countless rules have been broken to create something with a character completely its own.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 09:56 PM
10 October 2004
Bradley Shopping Center
The nameplate for a 50s-era strip mall in the d.c. suburbs, this sign is one of the last vestiges of the city that I remember from my childhood. Like many inner suburbs, Bethesda went through an office tower construction boom during the speculative bubble in the 80s. As a result most of the buildings from earlier in the century were bulldozed to make way for atrocious post-modern mid-rises that would stand vacant for over a decade. In fact even the shopping center at the foot of this sign underwent a less than successful 80s remodeling in which a second ‘Bradley Shopping Center’ sign was added at the other side of the parking lot consisting of those words set, one per line, in (predictably) Helvetica. How they saw fit not to tear down this defiantly retro artifact in the name of Progress is beyond me.
In terms of the type, there’s much to like here, at least in the script portion of the sign. There’s a lovely swash on the capital B and the thin looping strokes connecting the letters in the ‘ley’ section offer a nice contrast from the otherwise unmodulated weight of the letters themselves. It is surprisingly restrained and unornamented for a script face with much of the dynamism it does possess coming from the gently curving baseline forming an asymmetrical arc between the base of the B and the descender of the y. However this simplicity interacts well with the decidedly spartan Helvetica text that lies below it, thus it doesn’t need to overdo its frilliness since the contrast will heighten whatever is already there.
Much nicer is the other sans font announcing the parking policy. I particularly like the framing rules above and below the shrunken letters of ‘for’. It’s a charmingly victorian touch to both de-emphasize and decorate such connective words, and seeing it in a utilitarian context like this is pleasingly disorienting.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 05:50 PM
Friendly Eating
This greek deli on Mass Ave lies between central and harvard squares. Its logo offers an interesting contrast with the script face in the Bradley sign. The most obvious commonality is the curved baseline, though in this case we see not so much an arc as a slightly attenuated upward slope. Again as well most of the typographical flourishes are devoted to the leading capital character, which somehow still reads as an F despite the fact that the upper arm extends solely to the left—presumably it is still recognizable due to the integral sign-like cross stroke.
A key difference from the Bradley script is the degree of variation in stroke width, giving it a much more calligraphic feel, as opposed to the heavy-marker look of the previous sign. On some letters this successfully highlights some of the more refined touches, such as the rounded terminals on the F or the bowl of the e. However things seem to have gone awry in the dot over the i which has swollen out of proportion and in fact appears to be wider than any stroke in the letters themselves.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 06:03 PM
18 October 2004
Sidewalk (i)
A clover from a residential street between Garden and Huron Ave.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 10:50 PM
Sidewalk (ii)
A sidewalk medallion from behind the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 10:51 PM
Sidewalk (iii)
A sidewalk medallion at the foot of the bridge across the commuter rail tracks below Walden St by Porter Square.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 10:53 PM
10 November 2004
Celco
The nameplate on an apparently disused CELCO substation at the intersection of hampshire and broadway.
It’s difficult at first to focus on the text itself since the effect of the selectively-peeling paint is so beautiful. The colors must have been even more striking when the building was initially painted though with the contrast between the red walls and the bright green door.
That said, the letters themselves have more character and idiosyncratic charm than just about anything you’ll find on a storefront today. As a result they are quite difficult to classify. They are clearly modern, as can be seen in the different stem widths in the capital M, however they are much less angular than the typical modern—witness the exaggerated lower bowl of the B and the reversed curve on the leg of the R. Also quite interesting is the asymmetry in the capital C, with a sharp, vertical upper terminal and a much broader, blunted lower terminal which is angled well off to the side.
Most interesting of all though are the art nouveau touches as seen in the elevated cross bar of the capital E and the gigantic, wedge-like serifs that balloon out of its upper and lower arms. A similar wedge effect can be seen in the capital T whose upper portion appears to have been a rectangle of metal with a semicircle stamped out of its bottom center. The result is a surprisingly successful contrast between the perfectly horizontal top and the graceful curves hanging below it.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 10:44 PM
Stencil Church
A church on hampshire ave between kendall and inman squares.
The contradictions in this sign are staggering on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start. The most dramatic is the idea of using a stencil and spray-paint to render blackletter text. Combining the tools of modern graffiti with letterforms more commonly seen in medieval illuminated manuscripts seems like some kind of PoMo stunt, ‘transgressing’ boundaries between high and low culture. Yet here it is being used for presumably more practical reasons.
An additional ironic twist on this is that using this modern but sloppy inking technique actually produces results in some ways closer to the original than what can be achieved with today’s laser printers. Since the spray paint doesn’t dry instantly it’s given a chance to run and expand the letterforms slightly while it’s still wet, in the same way that ink from a nibbed pen would seep off to the sides slightly as it was absorbed into the paper. Both of these effects lead to a slight irregularity to the edges and variation from instance to instance of a given single character—a form of variation that is all but unseen in these days of offset printed precision.
The secondary conflict in this sign comes in the informational text below the church’s name. Here the type switches to a more traditional stencil face (so it’s now in harmony with the means of production), but now the composition is pairing the sacred blackletter with a rather utilitarian and military-looking bold serif (dissonance returns).
A couple of highlights from the blackletter section: (a) the rather cutely decorative tail on the lowercase h, and (b) the fact that the stenciling necessitated splitting the s in ‘Adventist’ into two separate (and strangely symmetrical) cells shaped like 7s.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 10:51 PM
11 November 2004
Academy of Arts & Sciences
The mysteriously under-defined American Academy of Arts and Sciences on Beacon between Porter and Inman squares. This hand-painted sign has some beautifully restrained and unique letterforms with serifs so subtle as to make classifying it as a non-sans difficult (though in part this may be due to them having been weathered off).
What’s particularly satisfying in this sign is noticing the way that the letterer’s plan for each character develops over subsequent copies. Compare for instance the lower arms of the capital E’s in American, Academy, and Sciences. In the first instance, the terminal is slightly angled to the right but doesn’t seem to project upward at all. By the second E the lower arm swoops up over the entire course of the stroke, but for the final E the stroke now consists of a horizontal section followed by a more abrupt upward curve to a rounded point. By the time he reached the ‘vehicular entrance’ text, all bets were off: the E’s now have sharp, inward-turned serifs that nearly touch the cross stroke at the center of the character.
Similarly interesting variations can be seen in the A’s. The lead character in ‘American’ has the familiar, modernist contrast of a thin left stem and a thicker one on the right side. Subsequent A’s lose this degree of rigor with more or less uniform widths for each of the strokes. More interesting though is the wildly varying character of the serif at the top of the character. For the first instance, it is a restrained bracket, by the second A in ‘American’ it has become a wedge serif, and by the A in ‘Arts’ there doesn’t appear to be a serif at all.
In any case, we can be especially appreciative of the artistry in this sign given what seems to have come before. If you look carefully at some of the blue sections, you can see that this sign was actually painted over and re-done. From the look of it, its previous incarnation was far more characterless with mass-produced, blocky sans serif letters that may have done a better job of suggesting the Science portion of the title, but certainly not the Arts.
(A lightly-processed blow-up of the remnants of the old sign can be seen here)
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 12:01 AM
The Oxford
An erstwhile hotel (now apartments) on Oxford street just south of the Somerville/Cambridge border. The typeface in this case isn’t tremendously unique, aside from its being implemented in stained glass. The diagonal through the capital O is an unexpected touch giving the otherwise celtic-looking characters a bit of a blackletter feel.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 12:07 AM
13 November 2004
John Murio’s
One of the many ‘markets’ (more commonly referred to as liquor stores) dotting haight street in san francisco. Unlike most of the earlier examples, the appeal of this sign doesn’t relate directly to the typefaces used, since neither the blocky, italic sans-serif ‘John’ or the neon script-face Murio’s is particularly unique or noteworthy. However, the overall composition is fantastic. The letters in the John line slope off to the right but seem to be doing so in accordance both with the fact that the sign has a rounded corner, cutting off the top-left edge of the rectangle and the fact that the entire upper portion of the sign is ‘indented’. All this creates quite a bit of rightward movement, but paradoxically is balanced out by a large portion of whitespace off towards the inner edge of the sign. All of this adds to an interesting justification illusion. The text looks left-aligned since it’s so close to the rounded left edge of the sign, and the white expanse off to the other side, but because of the indentation, John is actually centered with respect to the ‘Murio’s’ line.
The other nice element of the sign is the use of color. The ‘John’ characters rise right out of the red field which serves as a contrasting background for the white script type. By using that field as the baseline, the characters seem to be outgrowths of this large, empty space. More unintentional though is the effect that time and weather has had on the palette of the sign, wearing away the reds and adding an interesting level of shading to the white stripe at the lower left, which has the effect of highlighting the dark outlines surrounding all the characters.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 06:49 PM
Frank’s
Another SF liquor store (this one a little more honest about its true identity). This sign is full of weird details that don’t entirely mesh with one another. For one there’s a little indecisiveness over whether the font wants to be a serif or a sans. The ‘F’ and ‘S’ in Frank’s are both fairly classical looking, though the combination of the wedge serifs on the F’s stem and upper arm, but a chunky slab serif on the crossbar is a little odd. In the case of the S, the graceful curve at the top is offset by what can only be considered a fang sticking out of the bottom. It looks like they also decided to borrow the unconnected capital A from the sans cap font in the second line, making for an awfully strange pairing.
The ‘Liquors’ line seems to be a synthesis of the type styles in the two lines above. Characters like the ‘L’ borrowing the straight blockiness of the ‘Haight & Cole’ line, while the final ‘S’ (with its imitation of what appears to be a swan’s profile) returns to the ornate-yet-fanged style of the top line.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 06:51 PM
Rexall
A pharmacy on telegraph ave in berkeley with a fabulous heavy script face and a saturated orange backdrop combining for a strongly retro feel. It’s always seemed a little ironic for huge, industrial signs to be aping the look of cursive handwriting, and I especially like the admission of that friction that you see in this case. For while the script itself tries to look regal and sophisticated, its mass assembled-ness ends up getting betrayed by the visible rivets where the slabs of metal were fastened to the front of the building.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 06:52 PM
Launderland
A laundromat in a san diego suburb. There’s not too much to this sign necessarily. It’s pretty clearly just a stock font on a mass-produced sign. But its use here is highly effective, and the font itself is interesting. First, it has a truly gigantic x-height—the ascender on the ‘d’ is only half the size even of the counter—and this makes the InterCapping with the two capital L’s become a subtle cue rather than being a distracting and ostentatious dotcom boom-ism. Second, despite being lower cased, the characters are slightly letterspaced, which in this case actually makes the logo more readable. But the reason this is successful (despite breaking Goudy’s sheep-stealing rule) is due to the character of the letterforms themselves. Even though there is no absence of curves in general, their overall footprints are all highly rectangular (e.g., the ‘e’ which is just one big rounded box), so one could argue that these lower case letters actually have more in common with small caps than the sorts of characters that begin to fall apart in the face of letterspacing.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 07:29 PM
The Gables
An apartment building in the knob hill section of san francisco. It’s encouraging to see that hand lettering is not dead. Better still that it’s lettering that looks torn out of an Edward Gorey cartoon. Particularly nice touches include the capital ‘T’ turning into a horizontal rule framing the top of the word ‘the’, the nice humanist incline on the counter of the lowercase`e’, and the exaggerated curve on the ‘S’ in ‘Gables’ which ends up making some of the whitespace in the lower-left corner feel much less glaringly empty.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 07:39 PM
14 November 2004
Sidewalk (iv)
In front of a house on cottage ave west of porter square.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 03:11 PM
Dole Publishing
More strange mixtures of fraktur and inappropriate, modern type on the front of this defunct publishing house at the beginning of summer street in davis square. There’s something kind of charming about putting a ridiculously ornate capital on the front of a word set in univers—the plainest and most lacking in character (or any aesthetic appeal to speak of) of the mid-20th century sans-serifs. However, unless they were trying to make some sort of statement about their own modernity combined with traditionalism or something I’m confused as to why a publishing company would settle for such an amateurish-looking design choice....
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 03:33 PM
Submarines
A sign announcing some of the offerings of the Y-Not Variety market on Willow ave connecting davis and ball squares. So clearly this one caught my eye more due to the decay aspect rather than because the typeface itself is particularly noteworthy. And the pairing of the splotchily-fading black text in ‘submarines’ with the beautiful rusty sunset colors of the coke logo certainly adds something as well. Nonetheless, there are a few neat details in the ‘submarines’ lettering. It alternates between a greater roundedness than what you’d expect in a typical Univers derivative—with a nicely caligraphic stacked ‘a’ character and a rather long finial on the ‘r’—and strangely sharp, angular touches—the 45° turns in the middle of the capital ‘S’ and hard edges on the left of the ‘b’.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 03:38 PM
22 November 2004
DeLux
A tiny restaurant in the south end. After waiting an hour for a table there once, we were then informed that they were out of the ingredients for about 50% of the menu.... All the same, the place’s identity is quite striking in the context of its neighborhood which maintains a painfully tasteful and traditional (though admittedly beautiful) Boston aesthetic of brick, bay windows, and colonial ironwork. As a result the white-on-bright-red characters of the DeLux sign positively scream, despite the fact that they would be virtually invisible were the storefront on mass ave or commonwealth.
I particularly like the contrast of the red squares against the dark green paint of the door and shutters. And within the cells of the signs itself, the white of the characters stands out quite starkly, but the effect is considerably more calming than it would be were the red and white reversed. Also perfectly chosen for playing up the disconnect between the restaurant’s graphic identity and that of the surrounding neighborhood is the typeface—a mid-century modernist sans serif. It is overwhelmingly unadorned and makes for yet another interesting contrast between its own minimalism and the comparatively ornamented entrances and walkways nearby. The one interesting feature of the font itself is the ‘e’ character whose outline is almost perfectly rounded as it turns in upon itself.
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 01:18 PM
Teddy Shoe
A shoe store on mass ave in central square. The appeal here is somewhat similar to the John Murio’s sign: an already retro design made even older and more colorful by the askew and blasted state of its neon tubes. Different though is the fact that this sign is completely defined by its hard angles. Every character is a block, the ‘oval’ around ‘cancellations’ is really an octagon, and even that is bordered by Deco-style horizontal rules. (And for the record, I’m still a little confused as to how a shoe gets ‘cancelled’...)
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 01:21 PM
Kaplan Furniture
A victorian sweatshop-style building off mass ave in the area between central and kendall where MIT stops and the warehouse district begins. They clearly had a major design problem to solve given the length of the company name and the narrowness of the paintable-space on the side of the building (only this corner is visible to passers-by on mass ave). Whether their approach was entirely ‘successful’ is left as an exercise to the reader. The extremely slanted baselines coupled with a reverse-oblique axis on the characters themselves makes the sign legible even without cocking your head, but also makes the words feel highly unstable—as though the words would fall right off to the left if not for the white border holding everything together.
The touch I appreciate the most though is the inclusion of the street address in the top and bottom corners. The 9 numeral along with an adorably literal arrow pointing to the doorway make the sign do double-duty as both advertising and mail delivery. Now that’s economy of design...
Posted by Christian Swinehart at 01:34 PM