Journey to the End of the South Bay

The following pictures are taken from a day trip that I made two weeks ago to Santa Cruz. Though it was a weekday, and there wasn't a soul out nor a ride operating at the boardwalk I was able to have a great time soaking in some of the sign work that this beach community has to offer.  Below are a few examples.

"This way to the beach" ...and the rest of the blog post...

The window facing the sun has seen a few too many winters.  However this gem is still holding strong.

The Sky Glider!

Neptune's Kingdom: A favorite of mine for as long as I can remember.

Grandma had nothing but nice things to say that day.

This ghostie was a silk screened sign.

Speaking of ghosts... We all concluded our day trip with a self-guided tour around the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose.  Here's the painted sign to prove it. If you haven't gone, I highly suggest it.  Just doing the FREE self-guided garden tour is incredible.

Which way to the loo?

I guess it's been a couple months ago now, since we gilded and painted these signs for the restrooms in the entry hallway to Foreign Cinema.  One of the head honchos there, Gayle (who also runs Showdogs, for whom we did some signs at about the same time), invited me over to check out the space.  We flipped through some reference books, and she plied me with... oh, I think it may have been scallops and squid, I dunno--and some cocktails from their skilled mixologists (which, no doubt, have impaired my memory of the appetizer).

While she and the staff pondered exactly what terminology they wanted to use on the signs (like, obviously they should just change over to all seafood, and go with "buoys" and "gulls"), I came up with a few design sketches:

As you can see up top, they chose something akin to the first sketch, and opted to go with neither women, men, buoys or gulls.  Had I known about it then, I might have referred Gayle to this online exploration of the semiotics of toilet signs (or this collection of "coolest" toilet signs), although those may have served no more use than my buoys and gulls suggestion.  Nonetheless, I hope, for all our sake, they have one of these alongside the urinals.

So you need a typeface?

Scott's putting together a FAQ page for our website, to help folks organize their thoughts and questions when shopping for a sign from us.  We don't generally deal much with letter styles at the earliest stages of bidding.  Used to be, not so long ago, I made most of the design decisions, after maybe a few simple questions: Serifs or no?  Gothic or Roman (that is, single stroke or thick 'n' thin)?  Casual?  Script? That sort of thing still happens, when customers want a sign that looks hand painted by dint of having been designed with the brush in mind (as opposed to "looks hand painted when you stand really close, and maybe run your fingers over the letters' edges").  However, as we settle ever deeper into our digital age, folk are tending to get much more choosy with the plethora of letter styles available to them.

Be that as it may, I don't think this chart will be very useful for our FAQ page, but it's funny (and maybe we'll buy a poster, just to have on hand):

It has a good bit of fun with Comic Sans, which, really, you should be careful with, because you wouldn't like Comic Sans when it's mad.  Or maybe you would.

(via BoingBoing)

And yet MORE Levi's

I didn't realize, when we were lettering windows at Levi's last month, that we were gonna be replacing those letters with new ones this month. I hope they keep going forth with the current ad campaign, if it means a regular gig. Regular gigs are nice.

Yesterday, besides Ken doing these letters, we sent Aaron out to the Levi's print shop, to help remove the big Levi's sign can we painted in July. Apparently, it's moving to another location, in another city.

Recent visitors

Yesterday, Pete Kimack dropped by, as he does occasionally.

There he is, on an earlier visit, meeting Steve Karbo (New Bohemia's founder) and showing the inspiration for a painting he was working on at the time.  Yesterday, he was on his way to ePress Books, across the street, to check on a re-print of his 2nd volume of Lines Unlimited: A Coloring Book for All Ages.  He brought along Roger, owner of Universal Signs, for whom (and for whose father) he used to work, on occasion.

I tried to get some handle on the layout of the billboard biz, from Roger, but didn't get the chance to conduct any sort of lengthy interview.  He says he occasionally gets to paint a billboard, but that only comes up rarely anymore.  They don't even print the billboards at Universal: they just hang 'em.  The client (say, Nike), might contact the billboard owner (say, CBS Outdoor Media), who might hook them up with a printer, and then Universal would be subcontracted to hang the art the printer produces.  Roger says that even when they were doing a lot of billboard painting, in the past, it was never the case that billboard painters were ever tasked with designing the things.

I guess that's kinda the same way it's working out in NYC with Colossal Media.  I mean, I dunno, except for in that Dewar's campaign, wherein, I guess, the designs came from Shepard Fairey.

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Anyhoo, we also had a visit, last Friday afternoon, from Annica Lyndenburg, the skills behind Dirty Bandits, a NY-based design and illustration biz.  We immediately hit her up for a set of her pick-up line business cards:

She was also kind enough to leave us a few ex-boyfriend postcards, which we are encouraged to re-gift to some less-agreeable ex-clients... (resisting urge to embed hyperlink here).  She says she might like to get away from New York on occasion, and take a holiday huffing 1Shot fumes.  I think we can accommodate.

Vanilla Shadow Mixing Music

This week we made an ice cream cone sign, for Super Duper Burgers.  They wanted one modeled on the cone we painted for the San Francisco Chocolate Store (which, I'm told, might actually be on the same block as Super Duper...), but with a swirl of soft serve atop.

Ken took charge of designing, laying out, and painting the letters.  After I pulled the shape of the swirl from the fro-yo art we'd drawn up from a reference provided for an old Loving Cup sign, I tasked Aaron with turning it into the chocolate-vanilla blend that Super Duper asked for.  My instructions to him were that it be in flat, graphic colors, no blending, with a chocolate color, a vanilla color, and a shadow tone for each.

We have a wall rack of Dixie cups and coffee cups, each half full of some color or other we've mixed for various jobs--many of which never get used again, if not for a sample sign or practice session.  Every half year or so, they end up in the trunk for a run to the toxic waste drop-off point for the SF City Dump.  But Aaron managed to find therein, both a creamy milk chocolate, and a somewhat chocolatey-er shadow of creamy chocolate.  They looked, in the cups, very much like melted ice cream.  I have no idea what we'd mixed them for before.  They weren't in the other cone sign.  They were, however, making us hungry for ice cream.

Aaron whitened up some ivory, to serve as vanilla, but his work day ended before he could tackle the Vanilla Shadow.  Thus, the job fell to me, leaning as I ever do, on the ol' color theory maxim that complementary colors make shadows for one another.  So, I dunno, you can judge the results, above--I had a kind of lavender in mind; but more importantly: it felt imperative that a vanilla shadow mixing mood be set, by the appropriate musical selection.  Vanilla shadow mixing music...

Fortunately, just a week earlier, I'd reacquainted myself with an erstwhile playlist fave, the sets Derrick Bostrom published some time ago, on his Bostworld blog, as Your Favorite Little Podcast.  I highly recommend you subscribe through iTunes, and "get all", especially if you have any pressing need to tap into the darker side of vanilla.

I don't want to over-describe it...  sure, there's a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n' roll... has been derided as "elevator music".  I write that much just to sift out the chaff.  Grainier folk: dig in! It's a rich selection.

While you're waiting for all that to download, avail yourselves, under no obligation, of course, to the remaining "trash, treasures, oddities and obsessions" Mr. Bostrom has catalogued in Bostworld.  He's benefiting us all, photographically and stereophonically, through the troves his local Arizonan antique and thrift dealers have reaped, presumably from the inward migration of our nation's retirees.  I think I'm gonna get our apprentices to practice their grasp of the permeability of the top 'n' bottom guides in a row of letters, by painting the fonts from these Union Pacific calendar pages...

You might also be interested to read his reports on what it's like to have been a Meat Puppet--although you'd prob'ly wanna be mixing something other than vanilla shadow at the time.

Then, too, you might wanna check out his weekly show, C'mon, Let's Live a Little!, on Luxuria.com radio.  It's just past 3 on a Saturday afternoon, right now, so I'm tuning in live!

To be fair, one need not only be mixing vanilla shadow to enjoy this.  Ken and I were blaring C'mon, Let's Live a Little! through the soundsystem at Revival, while we were working on that this week, until the upstairs neighbors called down to the maître d', and asked that it be turned down.  So, it works well with laying gold leaf, too.