Tag: signage

To me, this menu board is so Australian. Every sportsground and showground must have a shabby weatherboard kiosk with a roller-shuttered window and a signwritten bill of fare: a kiosk that looks abandoned and neglected most of the time but comes alive when a game is on and the shutter is opened. I see this sign and I can smell the hamburgers and hot dogs cooking on the grill, hear the roar of the crowd when a goal is scored. And what value! $6 for the lot!

Butchers are proving to be quite, um, fruitful with their signage. In general they are such a happy lot, always ready with a sharp knife to dice that juicy piece of rump steak for your casserole. Perhaps all that cleaver wielding puts them in a good frame of mind to beautify their establishments. This building no longer houses a butcher, but there is no doubt it still has a lot going for it, with its richly stained and cracked render, decorative brickwork, and simple, no-nonsense sign, which despite its age and missing letter remains surprisingly modern.

It’s Saturday, customarily the day to sit around all morning with coffee and the paper. These days The Paper isn’t what it used to be — and it just isn’t the same on the iPad — but at least my local paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, is still being printed. The Melbourne Herald was a broadsheet newspaper published from 1840 to 1990. It began as the Port Phillip Herald and within eighteen months had the largest circulation of all the Melbourne papers. In 1849 it changed its name to The Melbourne Morning Herald and General Daily Advertiser. Quite a mouthful, when all you really need is one bold sans serif word to get the message across! The paper changed its name several times until it finally became The Herald on 8 September 1855 until its demise 135 years later.

Before tourism, and before Ford, the wool industry brought wealth and identity to Geelong. Proximity to farmlands and an excellent port helped establish the industry and in the 1900s woolstores lined the foreshore – although these days those red brick woolstores house university campuses and shopping centres. The Federal Woollen Mills building is a little way north of town and was built around 1915 for the Department of Defence as a textile mill. The tall metal letters are still intact, but all the more appealing for their stains and rust and evidence of birds nests poking out from corroded corners.

As a designer you wouldn’t catch me dead angling type this way (let alone spacing the words so far apart), but this is so quirky they actually get away with it! There is an element of jauntiness and lightheartedness about it that is quite appealing. Interestingly, it’s the English words that get the wonky treatment – the characters are sedate in comparison – but that only adds to its charm.

Everything good on tv is at the wrong time so the hard disk recorder is my friend. I can’t even remember what late late late night movie this came from, but it doesn’t really matter – one look at the sign and you can hear the neon crackle, taste the beer, hear the music, know that you’re going to be driving too fast on some deserted backroad on a moonless night. The power of typography is astounding in its ability to evoke mood and imagination. Roy’s would not be nearly so inviting if it was in Times New Roman or Arial.

I like everything about this fish and chips: the red no-mucking-around sans serif and the chunky blue script leave no doubt as to what this vendor has to offer. And I particularly like the ampersand. Then there is the bonus embellishment of fishy line drawings and an orange crustacean that definitely isn’t an oyster. I also like how the sign itself hangs from big hooks, a catch of the day in its own right. Word has it that the takeaway here is pretty good, so I’d better get down there again and find out.