99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-74- Hand Painted Signs

Episode Date: March 8, 2013

There was a time when every street sign, every billboard, and every window display was made by a sign artist with a paint kit and an arsenal of squirrel- or camel-hair brushes. Some lived an itinerant lifestyle, traveling from town … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you've ever wondered what squirrels were good for besides being adorable Wonder no longer these are lettering quills the brushes I was talking about and they generally are squirrel hair That's got Theson from new Bohemia signs a world famous hand painted sign shop in San Francisco. And have pretty long, very thin handles you control them as you're painting an O or an S. Look at any movie made before 1983. And you're seeing hand painted signs everywhere.

You would see a certain type of an A or a certain type of an S being repeated and all this different signage in certain neighborhoods. And that was the first time for me. I realized there was actually a job that was a sign painter. It's not as common a job these days, but sign painting is still thriving. And according to some of the voices you'll meet today, even undergoing a kind of renaissance. But let's start with a cartoonist.

Not just any cartoonist, though. One of America's original underground cartoonists, Justin Green. My comic book, Pinky Brown, meets the Holy Virgin Mary. That's my best known work that I did as a young man. I can't seem to shake a little bastard. I got to see Justin speak last year at this fancy academic comic book conference in Chicago. And he gave me a book of his sign painting comics.

Reporting right there is our friend Benjamin Walker. The way Justin Green tells it is one night his wife asked him how he was going to pay the bills. And he said, I'm a cartoonist. And she said, I know, but how are we going to pay the bills? But an artist entering the sign painter's world had to tread carefully. Because to tell you the truth among hard-bitten sign painters, the word artist is a majority. Mechanics is the term they use.

Justin came up with an ingenious way to have it both ways. He threw himself into the world of sign painting, and chronically reading technical manuals written into 20s. Hustling for work, learning on the job, and gathering tips from the elder statesman mechanics, and he documented all of his adventures in a comic strip he called Sign Game. But the best thing about these strips is that Justin actually teaches us how to look at

old hand painted signs. I literally did that. I mean, I would stand in front of these old sunburned signs like a history detective and I would see how good the craftsman were. If someone was a fledgling or a drunk, you would see lots of brush work around the tricky parts like an old, an old, by an old timer was done in about four strokes, amazingly. Although any neophyte can use 50 strokes to get in the ballpark. But at that point, you can't make a living.

So you very quickly learn how to coordinate your eye and hand. It's mind blowing to think about what was done by hand and in comparison to, you know, how things are done now. That's Faith Levine. She just co-directed a movie about sign painters. It also wrote a great book with a guy named Sam Maken. My name is Faith Levine. Faith and Sam interviewed a number of sign painters, including Justin Green. To tell a story about a group of people who used to be in charge of how our cities look.

Certain letter forms were ideal for a barber shop and yet not for a restaurant. Sometimes I think the most well-designed signs are the ones that we don't even notice, like a no parking sign or the street signs that tells how to get where we're going. And so, you know, we got a lot of really amazing stories about people, you know, getting jobs, lettering all the street signs for an entire city back in the day. This was a standalone trade and industry that employed, you know, thousands of people

that had a direct impact on or hand in, you know, defining our commercial landscape. All of the sign painters Sam and Faith introduce us to are unique. But as a group, there's a consistency to these unique individuals. They're characters for lack of a better word. Or as Justin Green puts it. Anyone in the sign field is a little bit nuts. We got some wild stories.

Many of the sign painters use their painting skills to crisscross the country. Bob Doors says that he could just show up in a town on a Greyhound bus, sleep in a field, and be painting a sign the next day. It seems you can't be a good sign painter unless you're also a good hustler. You got a new business that opens, you walk in,

and you say, hey, I'm your guy. I'm going to make people come into your shop because I'm going to paint the sign that people are going to walk by, stop, look at, and come in the door because it looks so good. And that is your hustle as a sign painter. And that's what it was, and that's what it still is. At the heart of the sign painter hustle

is a promise that whatever you have me put pain on, a wall, a sandwich ward, or the side of your truck, it's going to make you and us both look good. You know, I'm gonna make sure that this truck stops traffic. But the thing is, there was never just one guy doing the sign painter hustle. Sign painting was competitive. It was very, very hard to break into the business.

It's like you couldn't get hired if you didn't have experience, but they didn't want to hire someone with experience because they didn't want them to take all the jobs. You really had to kind of earn your stripes. We're talking about a minimum of two years experience to even call yourself, you know, a sign painter and even that, it could be debated. Because you need to have the necessary knowledge of how to form the letters, lay out the wording,

certain kinds of informational signs that could be crisp and clear and a Roman-Lator form would be completely inappropriate. That knowledge needs to be just like so baked in that you can then apply it hanging on the side of a building in the winter painting fast. It really is an arduous training aesthetically and physically. In his sign game strip Justin Green tries to help us understand why things used to be done a certain way. In one of his comics he explains why sign painters didn't like to use the color yellow. You're required double coating and faded easily. But in every single one of Justin Green's comics you get a sense that he is scrambling to document a world that is fading away.

I felt compelled to do the sign game as a historical piece because I knew the world around me was crumbling overnight. Sign painting is by no means the only industry that was wiped out by digital technology. But still, I can't help but feel extra sorry for these guys because they got their butts kicked by vinyl. Specifically the vinyl platter, which looks kind of like a big computer printer. The vinyl platters are machines that would basically tap out vinyl letters. You would program in, you know, welcome, and then it would punch out the vinyl letters and you'd weed out the vinyl with a razor blade and put the welcome letters onto the surface of your sign. When vinyl first appeared, no one would accept it.

And yet for all intensive purposes, it was even better than a hand-painted sign because it was perfect. It was of the same color. It would weather better than paint. And for maintenance, because window washers were enemies, it stood up to them. The vinyl plotter was something

sign painters really liked to hate in theory. And it was considered like selling out, undermining your brothers in the trade. But then slowly the guys who stubbornly clung to their brushes would call the guys who had the machines when they got in the jam. And they'd say, I'm just going to do this once, you know, but could you, you know, you give me these hundred words and then before long everybody bought into it. By the mid 1980s, sign painters were no longer in charge.

It's a very simple story. Technology lowers the bar to entry. You've got people that are necessarily the most like visual people sometimes going into like a kinkos or a fast signs and saying, these are the words. And those words are printed it out on a thing they could qualify to sign, and that's what goes up. It's like a tower of Bebel. You know, there's thousands of funds. Fonks named after drill friends. But all is not lost for the sign painters. New and old businesses who want to advertise quality

and craftsmanship of the items and services inside the store want to sign that embodies that quality and craftsmanship on the outside of the store. And back in San Francisco at New Bohemia signs, Scott Theson says business is booming. It seems in the past three or four years there's been a resurgence of especially designers really appreciating hand painted signage. You know, the way the letters flow on the brush, you can do slight things to make the lettering look a little bit better. I think just having something that's hand done,

hopefully will always be appreciated. You know, it's the pendulum always swings back and forth. And unlike the cutthroat days of the hustle, New Bohemian now teaches sign painting classes that consistently sell out. And we don't view it as creating competition, we're viewing it as more people see that, you know, what a hand painted sign looks like, more likely someone's going to want it. Heather Harterson is one of the young painters who took up the craft a couple of years ago

and is now a journeyman painter at New Bohemian. Damon, who's the owner, always says, it's not perfect, it just looks really good. And that lends to what makes it beautiful, that little wobble is gorgeous. 99% in visible was produced this week by Benjamin Walker. For the intro, I imagine, you know, I'm Roman Mars and I'm talking about the cities and the signs how it used to be or my deep, backlit observations, blah, blah, blah. Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars.

It's a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, but we have a signed game comic from Justin Green, pictures from New Bohemia and a trailer for the Sign Painters movie all at 99%invisible.org. you