Is that....? (Yup.)
Brilliant art/knitting intervention by Lauren Marsden . Bravo. (Image copyright Lauren Marsden. Via Craft: magazine.)
Enseignes Montréal Signs
We’re working hard to set up the ‘Enseignes Montréal Signs’ community database – a kind of wikipedia for signs old and new in Montréal. More news as it happens..
Another part of the project is to step in and try to save certain signs that are under threat of removal/loss, or, having been saved by caring community members, are in need of new storage space. This is a very modest, low-budget effort which will nevertheless see some signs displayed semi-permanently inside one or more campus buildings at Concordia University.
Above, some of the Ben’s Restaurant signage, courtesy of the demolition crew; and, the Warshaw sign, courtesy the SDBSL (10/3/08). (My grad student helpers and I had just picked up the signs; we then laid them out on the grass at the Loyola campus to log everything, before placing it all in secure storage.)
The Saga of Elsie and Elmer
The Montreal Gazette reports today that two huge, lifelike cow heads – remnants of a 1950s 3D billboard on Sherbrooke St West in NDG – are under imminent threat of loss.
(photo© The Gazette)
UPDATE (10/9/08): I thought I came off sounding like a humourless (and unhelpful) old grump in Harrold’s Gazette article, so I actually contacted Parmalat to offer to take the cows. A very nice representative from Edelman Canada, Parmalat’s PR agency, wrote back to say: “the company still wishes to keep the signs at this time for future use, but wanted us to pass along the company’s thanks and appreciation for your offer and interest.” Moo.
America Is F*cked.......(Graphically at least)
(Video: Jess Gibson. Link via Design Observer.)
The Guaranteed Milk Bottle sign
I reported last year that the future of the tatty-looking Guaranteed Milk Bottle was far from certain, but here’s some heartening news, complete with dairy pun. From today’s Montreal Gazette. Photos of the milk bottle on Flickr. (Image:
'The Process' - How not to design a Stop sign
AP article on American Sign Museum
An article by the Associated Press all about the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati is popping up all over the web. Looks absolutely amazing. (If anyone out there has $1.5 million to donate to me so I can start the Canadian Sign Museum, I’m all ears.)
Ghost Signs of Hamilton
Currently showing at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Ghost Signs of Hamilton is a modest photographic exhibition documenting some of Hamilton’s ghost signs (also known as ghost ads). These sometimes vast, painted murals were once ubiquitous in many industrialized cities. Most have faded with time, become obscured or completely hidden by adjacent construction, or been lost completely through demolition. Very occasionally they reappear, if only briefly.
Here’s Chris DeWolf on some of Montreal’s ghost ads.
Signs and National Ideologies
MASZYNY DO SZYCIA (trans. SEWING MACHINES ), Warsaw, 1960s-2007. Ilona Karwinska 2007©
AS I WAS PREPARING a presentation about the Logo Cities project for the World Design Congress , to be held in Havana in October, it occurred to me that I have done very little to explore the meaning of monumental signs outside of capitalist economies. While we might be tempted to make easy, if entirely understandable, associations between neon signs and Western decadence (for example), a new photographic project challenges even this assumption. Polish Neon , a remarkable project of documentation by Ilona Karwinska, reminds us that monumental neon is not the sole preserve of North American drive-ins, diners, motels and casinos. As Karwinska notes, “With their intense interest in neon signs, the state officials [in Warsaw] would regularly request the engineers from Reklama [the State-owned sign company] to drive them around checking the condition of all the signs in the city and planning new ones”.
The recent, mass removal of signs across São Paulo brought cries of “Stalinism” (and “fascism”), and comparisons with the drab architectural sameness that, for some, typified the Eastern bloc. It’s unclear to me right now whether Warsaw is an exception, but the history of communist (albeit post-Stalinist) Poland clearly holds many surprises. Like the signs of São Paulo, Karwinska reports that most of the signs she photographed in Warsaw have disappeared. (Image courtesy Ilona Karwinska .)
Media Architecture Conference: The Impact of Building Integrated Large Scale Displays on Urbanism and Architecture (London, Sept. 11-12, 2007)
The future of logo cities, perhaps. Looks amazing.
