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November 13, 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 cds at November 13, 2004 06:49 PM