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November 13, 2004
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 cds at November 13, 2004 07:29 PM