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October 02, 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 cds at 09:50 PM | Comments (108)
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 cds at 09:56 PM | Comments (78)
October 10, 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 cds at 05:50 PM | Comments (124)
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 cds at 06:03 PM | Comments (413)
October 18, 2004
Sidewalk (i)
A clover from a residential street between Garden and Huron Ave.
Posted by cds at 10:50 PM | Comments (86)
Sidewalk (ii)
A sidewalk medallion from behind the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.
Posted by cds at 10:51 PM | Comments (87)
Sidewalk (iii)
A sidewalk medallion at the foot of the bridge across the commuter rail tracks below Walden St by Porter Square.
Posted by cds at 10:53 PM | Comments (74)