Alphabet City Press

10 July 201310 July 2013

Memphis

Memphis is an Egyptian, or slab serif, typeface designed by Rudolf Wolf in 1929 for Stempel, the Frankfurt type foundry opened by David Stempel in 1895. Slab serif typefaces were popular in the early 1800s but Memphis was the first twentieth-century slab serif design. The letter shapes are geometric and the stems and serifs have the same optical weight. Noticeable features of Memphis are the apex serif on the uppercase A and the angle of the tail on the uppercase Q. Memphis is an excellent display face for posters and headlines but also works well for short blocks of text.

7 July 20137 July 2013

Wires

The bas relief is what initially caught my attention. It’s too high for me to clearly distinguish what it says but it reminds me of a table setting – decorative plate, napkin, and some sort of modern geometric-inspired knife and fork. The building houses a corner food mart, but that’s just coincidence. The side benefit of looking up from street level at one thing is that your field of vision encompasses other things, like the grid pattern of wires and cross-bracing on the telegraph pole, wires appearing to go every which way when they are in fact quite ordered.

4 July 20133 July 2013

Confined space

I was amused by this footpath message. There was no obvious sign of ingress to the reputed confined space, so a permit would have made no difference at all. As for danger, well really, how dangerous could it be? They didn’t even spring for red paint! As it turned out, the same stencilled words appeared along the road at regular intervals, and I was just lucky enough to find the hatchless one first, posing as a piece of street art.

1 July 201330 June 2013

Bookends

I look up a lot these days, and as a result am so often rewarded by the sight of something unexpected. Along the main street, any main street, shop awnings and windows are so often cluttered with a mish mash of clashing styles, but a little higher up the facades can be left relatively unscathed. The decorative carved sandstone on this entablature is such a beautiful piece of relief sculpture, and it reminds me of bookends, which makes it even better.

28 June 201328 June 2013

Fuss

Glebe Point Road used to be a great street to wander down, full of quirky and interesting shops and a passing parade of quirky and interesting people. It’s a less inspiring stretch now because the diversity has gone — about the only establishment left selling anything other than food is the bookshop. However the architecture remains, including this facade with its elaborate intertwined letters. At first I was impatient with its convolutedness, but then rather pleased that I could decipher the letters to so aptly spell FUSS.

25 June 201325 June 2013

Super moon

It’s still cold. And wet. And miserable. And it’s all because of the super moon, with a trough off the coast and a low pressure system. A super moon is when the moon comes closer to Earth than usual—a hop, step and a jump at only 356,991 kilometres away to be precise—at the same time it is full. So the tides are high too, and my locality received more than half its average June rainfall in a single day. Inside the heater is on, and outside the washing is hanging wet and forlorn on the line, waiting for a sunny day.

22 June 201322 June 2013

Ale Signs

Winter in Sydney is mild compared to a northern hemisphere winter: nevertheless there is an ever-present permeating dampness, and today it really is cold. And raining. And miserable. Which naturally leads me to thinking about weather symbols like these. Ale Signs was designed in 1994 by Alessio Leonardi, an Italian-born type and graphic designer based in Germany. Leonardi has designed more than 50 typefaces, many of them lively and hand-drawn, and has published several books, including the comic book (co-written by Jan Middendorp) Mr Typo and the lost letters.

19 June 201319 June 2013

Window

I can’t remember if the first time I went to the Bega Cheese factory was on a school excursion or a family road trip, but either way, I seem to have always known, along with everyone else in NSW, about Bega cheese. Once, every drive down the far south coast leg of the Princes Highway involved a visit to the museum and cheese shop, so naturally my recent stay in Cobargo, just up the road, necessitated just such a trip down memory lane. This window, with its painted figures, overlooks the carpark, and although I have never noticed it before it has probably been there forever.

16 June 201316 June 2013

Foord’s

From what I can discover, the Foord of Foord’s Buildings was Charles John Foord, an alderman of Canterbury council in the early 1900s. He was obviously of some importance in the area because there is also a Foord Avenue and a Foord Street Footbridge over the Cooks River. The building is pretty shabby these days, but the bas-relief lettering of the nameplate still stands out bold and clear. I particularly like the apostrophe, as well as the surrounding pattern of painted brickwork and faded writing.

13 June 201313 June 2013

Pole

I was so focussed on the S in post and the O in office, and so horrified at the mess of signs, banners and posters covering the facade, with their excessive number of ill-chosen and badly used typefaces — I counted at least a dozen — that I initially failed to notice this fine juxtaposition of poles. I couldn’t bring myself to show the mess below the sandstone-carved lintel, and I am no fan of this style of screenprinted metal sign, but I do like the placement of the wonky telegraph pole in front of it. I also like the use of Eurostile, a geometric sans serif typeface, designed by Aldo Novarese in 1962 for the Nebiolo foundry in Turin.