DesignFetish - The Signage Issue by Martin

THE SIGNAGE ISSUE SAN FRANCISCO // LAS VEGAS MOTEL SIGNS // DARWIN BELL

Signs Online Thanks for grabbing this first issue of Signs, I hope you’ll enjoy it! In this first issue, the focus will be on a few cases to introduce you to the world of signage and this magazine itself. Perhaps marked by my recent trip to Las Vegas and California, I’ve picked out subjects such as neon signage, the famous Las Vegas Sign, signage in San Francisco and an interview with a very interesting artist from San Francisco. Signs are all around us in the city. Everywhere. All the time. Most of the time we take them for granted and hardly even notice most of them. But there is so much diversity out there, so many beautiful and unique signs in between the jungle of big boring signs of multinational store chains. Los Logos (not to be confused with the book) is the name of a new project to try and preserve the more unique signs of small privately owned shops and businesses. I think this is a really great initiative, a much needed counter-reaction to the commercialization and uniformity we see all around us. Having been there myself and walked its streets, I can say that San Francisco is a good example of my idea of how it should be. It is very diverse, everything from handpainted signs for small shops to other customized signs with personality to the clean and classy signs of Louis Vuitton and the likes. And, you barely notice all the big corporate signs. If you want people to really care, you have to keep the diversity. If everything looks the same, nobody will care anymore.

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This issues roundup of online signage resources.

Welcome San Francisco No Parking! Sign Language: Darwin Bell

Stephen Coles’ photos of the lettering and signage that impressed him in Stockholm. stewf.blogs.com/photos/ stockholmtype/

Generally about typography, this site is still a great resource for all typophiles. www.typophile.com

Covering typography in London’s cityscape. Lots of historical building, classic typography and architecture. www.publiclettering.org.uk

All kinds of design related news. Lots of photos and interesting articles. http://thecoolhunter.net/

10 Neon Signs 14 Las Vegas, Baby! 16 Motel Signs

Not exactly best known for it’s signage, San Francisco still has lots of hidden (and not so hidden) gems. For fans of hand painted signs and generally signs with personality and humor a walk through the city’s streets is highly recommended. San Francisco is a city with a long, long history. In 1776, the Spanish settled the tip of the peninsula, establishing a fort at the Golden Gate and a mission named for Francis of Assisi. With the California Gold Rush in 1848 the area became a popular destination for gold diggers and other settlers hoping to get lucky, and the city grew rapidly. The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, and gambling.

The city later became famous for it’s devastating earthquake and following fires in 1906. More than half the city’s population of 400,000 were left homeless. Luckily a lot of the city’s history still survived and is well preserved still. San Francisco is now a popular international tourist destination renowned for its chilly summer fog, steep rolling hills, and an eclectic mix of Victorian and modern architecture. Famous landmarks include the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, the cable cars and Chinatown. One of the more interesting areas of San Francisco, especially for designers, is Haight-Ashbury. The district is famous for its role as a center of the 60s hippie movement.

The 60’s era and modern American counter culture has been synonymous with San Francisco and the upper Haight neighborhood ever since. The great thing about this street nowadays is the diversity, all the small shops, and the atmosphere there. It is home to a number of independent restaurants and bars, as well as clothing boutiques, book sellers, head shops and record stores including the well-known Amoeba Music. Also noteworthy for the design-interested is Giant Robot, Kid Robot and Fifty 24SF Gallery in Lower Haight. You could say that San Francisco is a haven for designers and design-interested people. It has plenty of museums,

galleries, design schools, skilled designers and illustrators. Another great thing is that the big store chains and their signs are few throughout the city, and you can stumble upon great small shops all over. What you usually don’t hear or think a lot about, is the variety in signage and lack of disturbance huge billboards and ad campaigns often create in a cityscape. A good tip for those looking for interesting signage, is just going around exploring, especially smaller streets. The area around Union Square, the Haight-Ashbury area, Castro and the Harbor are especially interesting. Even if you’re blind, San Francisco is a great city when it

comes to signage. The city has installed a socalled Talking Signs System, that provides audible labels or directional information all around the city. They typically label entrances and exits, elevators, escalators, stairs and ramps, restrooms, telephones and drinking fountains. Other points of interest can be identified such as “information desk” or “ATM machine”. “Main boarding area further down this platform” or “hallway to exhibition area” are examples of other directional information you can get through this system. 

More signage from San Francisco:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/glyphobet/ sets/72157594542986698/  http://www.flickr.com/photos/studio_3/ sets/72157600028129653/  http://www.flickr.com/groups/sfwayfinding/  http://www.flickr.com/groups/sanfranciscobitsandpieces/

“Sign Language was born on a whim”, says Darwin Bell, the man behind the Polaroid camera, “while I was trying to come up with an original gift for my friend’s birthday” And so he began taking pictures of words from the urban environment surrounding him. With those words, he created phrases that were either twist on well-worn clichés (“Beauty is in the eye of the media”) or personal statements, both serious and humorous in nature (“Natural Selection is a Bitch”). The end result has been a unique, fresh perspective on a familiar idea that is absolutely oneof-a-kind and impossible to duplicate. Inspiration can come from a single word that catches his eye, as was the case with “My Rising Sign is One Way.” “I was drawn to the font of the word “Rising” that I saw at a laundromat and then came up with the phrase and found all the words on a very winding, detoured walk home from Upper Market.” Other times, the chase proves more challenging and he is forced to scour the depths of San Francisco to find all the necessary words. Darwin recounts, “I always jokingly say “Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself” and thought it would be fairly easy to find the words that I needed but “Wreck” is not as common a word as I imagined. I finally had to chase down by renting a car and driving to 3rd and Caesar Chavez,

which is not as easy to find as you would think.” With this scavenger hunt nature of Sign Language, comes a never-ending well of inspiration to draw upon in San Francisco and the Bay Area. “As long as there continues to be signs and as long as those signs are covered in words, there will be a driving force for “Sign Language”, says Darwin, “I really like the idea of taking little pieces of things I see in the world around me and using them to create something that they were not intended for and would not have existed otherwise.” 

Although often frowned upon, neon signage is still a big and very visible part of most modern cityscapes. Luckily though, most cities don’t have the same quantities of neon as Hong Kong or Las Vegas. First a little background on the invention of theese mesmerizing lights; The concept behind neon signs was first conceived in 1675, when the French astronomer Jean Picard observed a faint glow in a mercury barometer tube. When the tube was shaken a glow occurred, but the cause of the light (static electricity) was not then understood. When the principles of electricity were discovered, scientists moved forward towards the invention of various forms of lighting, and many experimented with applying electric power to tubes of gas. The French engineer, chemist, and inventor Georges Claude was the first to apply an electrical discharge to a sealed tube of neon gas (circa 1902) to create a lamp. The word neon comes from the Greek “neos,” meaning “the new gas.” Georges Claude displayed the first neon lamp to the public on December 11, 1910, in Paris. In 1923, Georges Claude and his French company Claude Neon introduced neon gas signs to the United States. Neon lighting quickly became a popular fixture in outdoor advertising. Visible even in daylight, people would stop and stare at the first neon signs dubbed “liquid fire.”

Nowadays when we think of neon signs, we often think of cheesy motel signs, bad bars in the middle of nowhere or all the signs in the overcrowded streets of Hong Kong. They’re like the tacky, ugly stepsisters of signage. Still, there is a lot of beauty to behold. Cruising down the strip in Las Vegas is a mindblowing and unforgettable experience — the impressions from the flashing neon almost too much to handle. The technology has also evolved a lot since the first signs were made. Says Hisakazu Fujita of the Japanese Neon Sign Association, “Neon signs used to be flat and lack in individuality, but recently they’ve become much

more interesting by taking on a three-dimensional quality. The development of materials approximating natural light has also increased the potential of neon signs. They are also an urban medium that speeks a form of street dialog.” Los Angeles even has it’s own Museum of Neon Art, not only showing their collection of signs, but also giving visitors tours around the city to see the best of it.  Read and see more at:  www.neonmona.org/  www.flickr.com/groups/neonsigns/  www.flickr.com/groups/ghostneon/

Perhaps one of the worlds most famous signs is the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign you can see entering the town of Paradise within the city limits of so-called Sin City. The sign is a Las Vegas landmark created in 1959 by Betty Willis and Ted Rogich for Clark County, Nevada. Willis received $4,000 for her work. The design is characteristic of the Googie architecture movement which was popular at the time. The sign was built by Western Neon. Over the years, the sign has been moved south several times on Las Vegas Boulevard as growth has continued. The back of the sign reads “Drive Carefully” and “Come Back Soon”. When seen up close, the circles on which the letters of the word “WELCOME” reveal themselves to be silver dollars. The sign is currently located in the center island of Las Vegas Boulevard across from the (now closed) Klondike Hotel & Casino. Some consider the sign to be the “official” southern end of the Las Vegas Strip. The sign, like most of the strip, sits in the town of Paradise and is located roughly four miles south of the actual city limits of Las Vegas.

In the early part of the twentieth century, there were few of the amenities available to today’s interstate traveller. West of the Mississippi, camping was the most common alternative to expensive hotels. The whole concept of motels originated with the Motel Inn of San Luis Obispo, constructed by Arthur Heineman in 1925. Unlike their predecessors, auto camps and tourist courts, motels quickly adopted a homogenized appearance. Typically one would find an ‘I’- or ‘L’- or ‘U’-shaped structure that included rooms, an attached manager’s office, a reception which usually takes up the space of one guest room and perhaps a small diner. Postwar motels sought more visual distinction, often featuring eye-catching neon signs which employed pop culture themes that ranged from Western imagery of cowboys and Indians to contemporary images of spaceships and atomic symbols. The motel began in the 1920s as mom-and-pop motor courts on the outskirts of a town. They attracted the first road warriors as they crossed the United States in their new automobiles. They usually had a grouping of small cabins and their anonymity made them ideal trysting places (or the “hot trade” in industry lingo). Even the famous outlaws Bonnie and Clyde were frequent guests, using motels as hideouts. The motels’ potential for breeding perceived lust and larceny alarmed then FBI chief

J. Edgar Hoover, who attacked motels and auto camps in an article he penned called “Camps of Crime”, which ran in the February 1940 issue of American Magazine. The role motel rooms have played in movies through the years probably haven’t exactly helped the reputation of motels either. From the Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to the motel in Robert Rodriguez’ From Dusk Till Dawn and hundreds of other movies, the motel more than often becomes a crime scene. Motel owners aren’t exactly portrayed in the best ways either, often as ignorant alcoholized slobs sleeping behind the curtain in the manager’s office, not caring about a thing. But I’m not going to focus on that part anyways, the important thing for me is the signage. Motel signs are almost an art form in themselves, and I find the old worn out ones especially attractive. A lot of them are downright beautiful, and I’m not the only one thinking so.

There are several communities both on- and offline trying to preserve this important piece of art history before they are scrapped and replaced by the Best Western or Motel 6 signs you see everywhere else. Some people have even opened their own museums dedicated to collecting and preserving old signs. Online photography community Flickr also has many different groups collecting photographers’ shots of motel signs throughout the United States.

“It’s a sad feeling seeing theese landmarks replaced by modern motel chain signs with no personality”, says photographer and sign enthusiast John Keltie. “It’s like someone replacing all your interesting friends with gray middle-aged businessmen clones you have nothing in common with. Who would want something like that? Motels are all about personality and adventure. They should at least look like they have it too.”

There are way too many motel signs out there to say say that they are generally good looking or not. Some are downright ugly while others are gorgeous, but many of them do have a lot of charm. So many things could be said about the visual expression of motel signs, but to a lot of us they bring back good memories of old times and adventures on the road. At least for me, motels feel like a part of the past, a piece of true vintage americana. 

Learn more about motel signs and see a lot more fascinating photos:  www.motelsign.com  www.flickr.com/groups/44319386@N00/  www.roadsidepeek.com/motels/  www.roadsidephotos.com/66/signsca.htm

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