Ceci N'es Pas Une Billboard

I came across this odd billboard on a Portland history blog the other day...

Corner of NE Union (now MLK Blvd) & NE Sacramento Street, 1929.

(Via the Portland Archives and Records Center)

It's got a typical 1920s billboard frame, but that frame is simply painted onto the shiplap on the building. Naturally, I wanted to make one to put on a model building someday, so here's my take on it, dropped onto a Clever Models white shiplap background.

For reference, I used the perspective tool in GIMP to straighten out the photo. I took the frame from a print ad for billboards, and fooled around with fonts to get a fair approximation of the original. (I swiped the colors from that print ad, too.) I altered the circle quite a bit by using different fonts, then rotated it a bit to jazz the design up a little. Once I had everything nailed down the way I wanted it, I used some of my GIMP tricks to make the sign appear to be recently painted on the Clever texture.

After I finished, I zoomed in on a higher resolution version of the original, and realized the original graphic designer put a clock face in the bottom of the 15, with fifteen minutes of the hour highlighted.

By the way, about the lettering for "FURNITURE EXCHANGE"; I just spent about $30 for "Show Biz JNL" by Jeff Levine. I'd been hunting for that font for quite a while, and there's no freebie version of anything close to it. It's a really good approximation of "Bulletin Board Thick and Thin Letters" as seen in The Expert Sign Painter, and variations on this typeface turn up in a lot of signage from that era.

From The Expert Sign Painter, 1922.

Levine's "Show Biz"

UPDATE: Looking closely at more of the pictures on the Vintage Portland blog, I see that these flat billboard frames were a thing... in Portland, at least; I've never run into them before...

Also, while looking for images of workers putting up billboards, I came across a Jam Handy film on Archive.org, To Market, To Market, which was very boring, but had a LOT of information about period billboards.

Font Abuse at the NMRA show.

I quite liked a lot of the models at this exhibitor's booth at the National Model Railroad Association's show at the PDX Expo Center this weekend, but this particular roof stood out as the most egregious bit of font abuse I saw all day...

 COMIC SANS!?

How could you spend all that time designing, building and detailing that building and then just slap COMIC SANS on it?

(UPDATE 5/22/16: I found a copy of Typography for the People: Hand-Painted Signs from Around The World (Plus 15 Free Fonts) by Daniel Bellon at a thrift store for under $5. I modified the image above with a font called Bellon Square, which has the kind of letters that might actually be used by someone who hand-paints signs like this...)

 

I have a few rules about fonts for model structures...

FONT RULE #1: Don't Use Comic Sans.

(There are lots of other fonts you shouldn't use on structure models, but just never use Comic Sans for anything, ever.)

FONT RULE #2: 

Don't Confuse Print or Screen Fonts with Signage Fonts.

(Print fonts are designed so the ink won't blob up where the lines join. Screen fonts are designed to look nice on your computer. Signage fonts are designed to be read and understood instantly at a distance.) 

FONT RULE #3:
Use All Caps.

(Names of businesses were almost never set in upper and lower case.)

EXCEPTION TO FONT RULE #3: 

Don't Use All-Caps With Script or Old English Fonts.

(Unless you're getting a prison tattoo or recreating modern graffitti.) 

 Old English set in all caps is a hallmark of

Southern Californian Chicano culture, 

but isn't appropriate for signage.

(By the way, I really like this!)

FONT RULE #4: 

Don't Use a Curved Baseline to Make It Look "Old Time-y."

(Most old signs on buildings were designed to be legible at a distance, not fancy. Curved baselines were mostly used in print and on packaging, and only very, very seldom on signs. I love Bar Mills models, but they get this wrong consistently.)

This is an authentic, vintage curved baseline, from a 

Sanborn Map, which would be really difficult to recreate,

and would never appear on the side of an actual building.

This is an ugly example of using a curved 

baseline to make something look old time-y.

 A Bar Mills model. A fine-looking structure,
but the font is a print font, and there's a curved
baseline on the 2nd"Amos Cutter", and again on
"General Merchandise." Don't try too hard to make
something look old fashioned!

 

FONT RULE #5

Don't Stretch a Line of Text to Make It Fit

(This changes the line weights, and makes the letters look all wrong. If you stretch side-to-side, the downstrokes get thicker; up-and-down stretching thickens the horizontal lines. Look for fonts that fit the space you want to fill without distortion.)

FONT RULE #5a

Don't Stretch Pictures, Either. 

(I wrote about this, here.)

FONT RULE #6:

The Fonts You Want: Sign Painter's Egyptian and Various Slab Serif.

(I've yet to find the former in a free font format, so I cut-and-paste from scans I've found online. The line weight doesn't change where the lines meet, and the reason for that is the technique sign painters used to paint letters: by rotating the brush as they went along. This makes the line weights different from calligraphic fonts, where the nib of the pen is typically held at the same angle while the letter is drawn, creating thick and thin lines. Slab Serif or "Block" fonts are used nowadays mostly for collegiate sports, but they were used for signs in the early 20th century.)  

From Henderson's Sign Painter by John G. Ohnimus

UPDATE: Here's a link to an inexpensive ($6) version of a sign painters' Egyptian font!

UPDATE: Here's a link to another, slightly Deco font that

turns up in a lot of ghost signs. Well worth the $30. 

FONT RULE #6:

Read Antique Sign Painters' Guidebooks.

(See above.)

FONT RULE #7: 

Signage from the Late 19th Century Always Ended with a Period.

(I don't know why; it just did. This trend lasted until about the 1920s. See the quote below, from Elements of Lettering and Sign Painting, 1899...) 

FONT RULE #8: 

Do Look at a Lot of Old Photos. 

(Any book from Arcadia Publishing is a good starting point. Arcadia's books are photo-heavy, so you will almost certainly find examples of signs from whatever era you're modelling. As a bonus, they'll be specific to the area you're building.)

FONT RULE #8a

There Were a Lot of Sign Painters Who Didn't Know the Rules.

I'm forever finding old photographs of really bad signs. Zoom in on the sign on the mill, and you'll see the letter spacing is so bad, it reads "ILWACOMILL &LUMBERCO." Y'know, I think it would be okay to redesign that sign, even if it is a change from the prototype. That sign painter didn't know what the hell he was doing.

Just because a sign painter got it wrong, you don't have to...

FONT RULE # 9:

There Are Lots of Free Fonts Out There. Go Get Some!

(DaFont, 1001 Free Fonts, etc.)

O Scale Bike Shop Modifications.

Started work on another of Clever Models' fine products. This time, I'm working in O scale, which is going to be a cinch after doing so many HO and N scale models. I'm modifying their cycle shop with a change of signage to push the era back to the 1890s.

Here's the original:

Per my client's request, here are my modifications to the facade:

The lettering for HOLZ & MUELLER is set in an Egyptian font I found in a vintage book for sign painters. BICYCLE REPAIR SHOP was set in an academic/sports font I found online. Slab serifs were pretty common in that era. 

All the posters were found online, and I've printed them on cigarette paper so the thickness will look alright when I peel up the corners a little. I printed the Raleigh and Fowler signs on glossy photo paper so they'll look a bit like enamel signs.

More to follow as the build progresses.

Ghost Signs for Cardstock Models using The Gimp

Inspired by the Fading Ad Blog, I tried my hand at creating a couple ads to drop onto a Clever Models texture sheet.

 

The Harold Lloyd sign on the top may seem unlikely -- why have a painted sign for a movie that might only run a few weeks? -- but it is based on an actual sign re-discovered a few years ago in Vancouver, B.C. when another building was torn down.

Seems the theater owner knew a building was going up and decided he could splash out with a painted sign. I changed a few things like the theater name and some colors, but I tried to match the fonts fairly closely.

 The second is my very liberal interpretation of an actual sign; the real sign used much less decorative fonts. This is always a decision you get to make when you're designing -- do I want it to look authentically old-time, or should I go for more of a modern idea of what "old-timey" is supposed to look like? Generally, the past was less fancy than we think, but sometimes I throw reality to the wind, because I like to fool around with fonts.

Here is how they look when I drop them on top of the Clever Models texture and lower the opacity of the sign layer.

 If I'm modeling a later era, I can lower the opacity still more to simulate further fading.

I got to fooling around with this, and decided I wanted to create the effect of a recently painted wall, which would make sense with that Harold Lloyd sign, since it was only supposed to be visible for a short time. Creating this effect is tricky using this technique -- by the time you drop the opacity just enough to see the wall (around 75% to 80%) you've created the illusion the paint has faded for quite a number of years.  But it's not impossible. The first step of the workaround is this:

(1) Copy two parts of the brick background that correspond to the areas covered by the painted signs, and (2) paste them as a new layer. Then (3) desaturate the colors to bring them down to greyscale, (4) invert them to make the dark areas light and light areas dark, and finally (5) adjust the brightness and contrast to make the shadows really pop.

Now when you make the translucent sign layer visible on top of this "white paint," it causes the the whites and light colors appear freshly painted, but you can still see a brick texture through them.

Naturally, all this works with Photoshop, too.