Articles tagged ‘hand-painted’

Vanishing Austin

Has that beautifully beat-up old sign you’ve driven past for years suddenly disappeared with a cold, glass and steel tower rising in its place? Obviously, if you’re here at NoRelevance.com you’re not alone. But if you’re also in Austin, TX then you’ve got a last chance to see some of those lost treasures and can even help save future vanishings. Vanishing Austin is a website dedicated to, well, basically what the name says. More specifically website owner Jann Alexander’s photographs of “Austin in transition contrast the often-contradictory beauty of the old juxtaposed against the new.” As an archivist myself of beautiful things lost to “progress” I can only stand on my chair and applaud such efforts. Ms. Alexander has also recently unveiled a new poster featuring Austin’s “Endangered Species,” available on her website. Good stuff!

Alvin Lustig Book Covers (via FaceOut Books)

Thanks to @brandi_duncan for turning me on to FaceOut Books and their inspiring blog, which features among others these wonderful book covers designed by Alvin Lustig. Reminiscent of Alexander Steinweiss’ covers for Columbia records, Lustig exploited the silhouette as design element and hand-drawn scripts to wonderfully tasteful heights. If you’ve read any of the books whose covers he designed for authors as varied as Franz Kafka to Henry James you will probably find that they were equally illustrative from a context standpoint. One can see resemblances to fellow modernist Paul Rand in the geometric and free-form shapes he used as well as his love for color. Check them out and be inspired.

Hand-Painted & Hand-Made Signs – Antigua BWI

JUST UPLOADED: Feast your eyes on over 20 beautiful, ugly, tattered and torn, hand-painted & hand-made signs from Antigua BWI. Signs from St. John’s, English Harbor, Rotten Hill and beyond are here for your drooling pleasure. View the thumbnail gallery or the slide show. Enjoy!

Eckhardt Signwork, an Inspired Font

Finally, the fruits of my labor are made apparent in the new and ever-relevant dingbat font designed by Jeff Levine called Eckhardt Signwork. An archivist of forgotten letterforms, Mr. Levine was inspired by many a sign photo found in the collections on this website as well as on Forgotten-NY.com, a terrific site I once blogged about years ago. As with many of his previous fonts Eckhardt Signwork reveals a caretaker’s handling of the tattered lettering that lay within these scratched and rusty relics. And while I’ve certainly received emails from all sorts of folks thanking me for the inspirations, I’ve only seen a few examples manifest like this. I can’t wait to see “YES” appear in print one day soon!

Hand-Painted & Hand-Made Signs – Turkey

Feast your eyes on over 60 beautiful, ugly, tattered and torn, hand-painted & hand-made signs from Turkey. Signs from Istanbul (not Constantinople), Izmir, Selcuk, Effes, Kabak and beyond are here for your drooling pleasure.  View the thumbnail gallery or the slide show. Enjoy!

Hand-Painted & Hand-Made Signs – Vietnam

Feast your eyes on over 40 beautiful, ugly, torn and tattered hand-painted & hand-made signs from Vietnam. Images hail from such cities as Saigon, Hanoi, Da Lat, Nha Trang, Hoi An, Da Nang and Can Tho just to name a few. View the thumbnail gallery or the slide show. Enjoy!

Hand-Painted & Hand-Made Signs – NYC

Finally, I’m getting these photos up for your viewing pleasure! Some beauties and some real dogs, but all hand-painted and hand-made with love, spite, anger, ecstasy or indifference. Feast your eyes on 189 (for starters!) new-old signs located in and around New York City and get ready for a LOT more from Vietnam, Turkey and elsewhere. View the thumbnail gallery or the slide show. Enjoy!

Metroscript Open Type Font

Surely by now you’ve come across Metroscript–a relatively new OpenType script typeface that’s being hailed as “one of the most complex digital script systems on the market” and rightfully so. Designed by Michael Doret of the Alphabet Soup type foundry, Metroscript takes full advantage of the OpenType format, which makes possible and incredible number ligature combinations and, thus, lends a more hand-made look to headlines and copy. My particular interests in it are from the standpoint of the computer-generated, cut-vinyl signage industry and its new tool for getting that hand-made look. Will it displace some old-fashioned hand-painters? It’s possible. Metroscript essentially presents the designer with a Rubik’s Cube of ligature options–most of which look good enough to print. So, I imagine many designers might end up wanting to use their comps as the finished product. Just press Ctrl-P.

Faded Signage & Signpaintr

I once again bow in humble submission, this time to two Flickr groups, Signpaintr and Faded Signage, the latter sporting over 7,000 photos of hand-painted/hand-made signs taken by over a thousand members from all over the world. There are active discussion boards within each group as well as RSS feeds to keep up with all the latest additions.

They Called Her Styrene

This tome of Ed Ruscha’s word drawings should satisfy both lovers of contemporary art and designers alike. They Called Her Styrene collects almost 600 ‘word’ artworks created by Ruscha since the early 1960s onward, which he executed in a variety of mediums including pastel, graphite, acrylic, gunpowder and even vegetable and fruit juices. While some pieces are as deadpan as the image on the book’s cover, others are stunning renderings of three-dimensional ribbon-like words. Shaped like a good sized brick, you’re sure to have enough room for this must-own monograph on your coffee table.