This direc­tional sig­nage on a local park­ing garage is the best use of neon I’ve ever seen. The let­ter­ing is clear enough on its own, but the in-and-out arrows, set per­pen­dic­u­lar to the text, bring the signs into the third dimen­sion, mak­ing the garage’s entrance and exit com­pletely unmis­tak­able. The enter arrow points in, and the exit arrow points out, yet they just barely avoid being clipped by the garage door when it closes.

Don’t you miss the days when the Postal Service was all about Helvetica? And not in a bor­ing, this-happens-to-be-our-default-font kind of way, but in a cool, cos­mopoli­tan, inter­na­tional, Bauhausian kind of way. They even used all-lowercase before that was cool. Seen today, this type makes me long for the USPS of the past, in the days before Univers and Star Trek-font took over their sig­nage. Heck, I’ll even for­give the com­pletely unnec­es­sary “thru.”

An unex­pected use of Gill Sans italic: Instructions on the proper gut­ting of a fish, found posted on a pop­u­lar fish­ing pier. I’m used to see­ing this type­face in more mod­ern, jet-set con­texts, but I guess it’s equally good at illus­trat­ing fishy cross-sections.

Note the incon­gruity of the two mes­sages being com­mu­ni­cated here.

First, there is the explicit mes­sage of the words them­selves, iden­ti­fy­ing this estab­lish­ment as both (A) a laun­dro­mat and (B) more specif­i­cally, the laun­dro­mat being owned and oper­ated by, or named in honor of, Bing Wong.

Second, there is the the mes­sage implicit in the let­ter­ing: Old, blackletter-style forms nor­mally com­mu­ni­cate his­tory, sta­bil­ity, and an estab­lished, here-for-many-years-to-come qual­ity. But in this case, the forms are phys­i­cal­ized in faded, brit­tle plas­tic that directly negates any truth to that claim. Judged by its let­ters alone, the place looks like it’s falling apart.

It’s hard to inter­pret the signmaker’s intent, and this con­fu­sion is what makes it inter­est­ing. You have to won­der, was this let­ter­ing choice delib­er­ate, and if so, what was the intended mes­sage? Or, did these red plas­tic let­ters just hap­pen to be on sale when Bing Wong was set­ting up shop?

On top of that, who would asso­ciate a Chinese name with a black­let­ter form that descended from Western Europe? When those let­ter­forms evolved, the two cul­tures were hardly aware of each other’s exis­tence (not to men­tion the fact that elec­tric­ity and indoor plumbing---essential com­po­nents of laundromats---wouldn’t be devel­oped until cen­turies later).

How po-mo is that?

The hand-welded let­ter­ing on this side­walk access panel cap­ti­vates me. Not only is it beau­ti­ful, but it was done by the hand of an elec­tri­cian, or a steelworker---either way, not a pro­fes­sional artist.