Vintage
I’ve always had an affinity for vintage-styled signs. I love old, wood carved signs, etched glass, painted, neon, you name it. There’s a style from the 1920’s through the 1960’s that really has class and craftsmanship you rarely see these days. Well, obviously there are a lot of styles during that time period but I’m talking about style.
Sometimes it’s something as simple as a poster or marquee for an event printed in a single color on paper, other times it’s etched mirrors with hand painting, wood frame, and brass accents. It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a vintage sign for a gas station, a bar, or milk truck. I love it all… the colors, the themes, lettering, shapes, you name it. Even if it is merely a subject that’s a golden oldie or just a font with a nostalgia all its own… it’s all good to me.
It’s not that I try to literally recreate specific vintage signs. I sometimes create a piece that could exist in reality (eg. a painted metallic sign) but sometimes I create a piece using elements that are suggestive of signmaking features or methods. Also, unless it’s for a specific client I design either generic or fictitious business names. Quite often I use names of either my friends as long as they don’t tread on existing trademarks or businesses or I use names from my childhood or home town (like the name of a street or river). Consequently, there’s a lot of designs that have some little bit of nostalgic meaning that’s probably not evident to the viewer but it’s there for me.
Although it’s rarely apparent in the format most people see the art (such as online web graphics or a tshirt) I take pride in working detail into as much as I can where appropriate. Sometimes, I feel, it’s those tiny details that may not be readily perceptible but fill in little mental suggestions that what you’re looking at could be real. It depends on the end-product because, for example, a design destined for a tshirt may not hold up as well if it has a lot of detail whereas a high resolution print publication may show off a lot more of the finer points.
An example of the differences in this would be two pieces: “Sport Deck Lounge” and “Engine 7.”
Sport Deck Lounge is a piece that, although not heavy on the “vintage sign” side of the line it still has some of the same qualities. It’s also a piece that was designed, from the start, to print correctly on apparel. I pushed the colors beyond the CMYK spectrum knowing they’d come down into something more printable but I wanted to ensure that whatever color capabilities were there would be taken advantage of and I chose the colors in gamut, first, before increasing them to also handle color shifts either way – and still look harmonious even if there was a green, blue, or red shift.
By contrast, Engine 7 was designed to be a high resolution piece that could stand up to the challenge of being printed on archival quality, high-gloss paper at poster-size and reflect a certain degree of realism. The order of the day was basically to create a commemorative plaque to for a destroyed ladder truck for a city department (I mocked up using “Engine 7″) and they wanted it to look as if the firm that built their beloved vehicle also built the plaque – except it’s in digital, printed form. So, it’s not literal as-if it’s painted on the door of an engine, but it’s technically correct in other ways – proper diamond plating that matches the metal and types of fatigue it’d encounter, the glossiness of the paint itself, the brushwork of gold leaf swirl recreated in vinyl lettering (how’s that for a double whammy reproduction?), and then, my favorite part, a detailed recreation of what would have been the pumper truck that was parked next to it in the bay reflecting off the shiny paintjob itself. That’s the part that really sold it – it’s as-if it were still parked next to the pumper and you could see the reflection of the gaugues, dials, levers, and fittings just barely hinting through.
Again, not that this piece exemplifies “vintage” in every way, although the style of lettering, technique, and overall fire fighting history are intact in how apparatus are frequently designed, it was about being faithful to the methods used by the original artists and, in this case, the devil is in the detail to pull that off.
Other times, I get a lot of joy in creating silly themed pieces that have a lot of to-do for nothing. Sometimes that is a really involved piece for a fictitious fruit company (named after a high school friend of mine). Either way, it’s about the art and style and the subject is sometimes secondary.
I’m not sure why I have such a fondness for all of these styles because, frankly, I’m too young to have seen it firsthand when such signs and paintings were common. Perhaps the fact I grew up in a small town that, to this day, exists in a bit of a timewarp, where one can sometimes see hints of the old days still in use has something to do with it? When I was a boy there were signs scattered around our little town that were 30 years old then – so maybe the fact I’m extremely nostalgic coupled with what I remember as a child bridges this historical gap?
It doesn’t matter why – all that matters is that it’s one of my favorite styles and I have a lot of fun adapting it to my own needs in this day and age.