Margaret Calvert on British Road Signs
Offbeat interview with Margaret Calvert who, in 1957, designed much of the roadsign system presently in use in Britain. Via boy-racer TV show Top Gear, of all things. (Thanks Kale!)
Signs (in six parts) - fascinating article in Slate magazine
From March 1-11, Slate magazine writer Julia Turner brings us a fascinating six-part article on signs.
Guaranteed!
UPDATE: More information on the restoration project from the Gazette. Here and here. Surprised to see that Heritage Montréal’s top ten list of things and places to save does not include the Farine Five Roses sign.
Montréal’s landmark Guaranteed Milk bottle has received an unexpected reprieve – and will soon have a fresh coat of paint. Score one for the city’s fast-disappearing industrial heritage, and bravo to Heritage Montreal
Photo by Flickr user • Christian & Cie •. CC 2007.
Logorama
Logorama is a new short film from H5. Looks amazing, and not wholly unexpected: H5 is the studio behind another brilliant video, Antoine Bardou-Jacquet and Ludovic Houplain’s The Child
Museum of Letters (Berlin)
I was a bit slow to discover this amazing place, but, gosh, what a place it is. The Museum of Letters in Berlin (site in German) and a Core77 showcase about the Museum, in English.
Two burning questions: a) how on earth did it get funded, and, b) how did they manage to collect all these examples? (For anyone who’s tried collecting old signs, you’ll know how difficult it can be: even if you happen to be there on the right day and the sign or demolition people are sympathetic, it’s still entirely possible to lose these things in dumpsters or scrap heaps, or for them to be spirited away, perhaps into someone’s private collection.)
Is that....? (Yup.)
Brilliant art/knitting intervention by Lauren Marsden . Bravo. (Image copyright Lauren Marsden. Via Craft: magazine.)
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.
