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.
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 .)
