Thursday, February 17, 2011

Signs


No, not the odious M. Night Shyamalan movie ("My son leaves half-empty glasses of water around! And these mimes in leotards are harmed by water -- that must be why they came to Earth, a planet that's 80% water! It's a miracle that restores my faith!" ) but my own photographs of signs I like. I've been interested in typography and design all my life and I've always been intrigued by older, largely-handmade signs that embody an advanced understanding of form, color, proportion and typographical beauty (even if the signmakers are just reproducing the trends of the day).

I started assembling these pictures a while ago, Photoshopping them only so as to remove the linear perspective from the original photographs and make everything rectilinear (and to remove the surrounding material). I started doing this in black-and-white but I just re-did the whole thing in color and it's definitely good-looking that way. (I've got a bunch more that I haven't finished yet; this is very much a "work in progress.") I'd be interested in any opinions on color vs. black and white (or on anything else).

Black and white: http://www.jordanorlando.com/signs

Color: http://www.jordanorlando.com/signs_color

And oh yeah...spoiler warning on Signs. Just think: You could have had your mind blown by the incredible half-empty glasses of water that the leotard-clad mimes are susceptible to (Who would have guessed?), and now I've gone and ruined it.

1 comment:

Octopunk said...

Nice! I thought, too, I would like the b&w better, and I looked at those first. But the colors are so wonderfully muted (sun bleached, I assume in some cases).

Mikes DELI Sandwiches is my favorite.

Btw, there was a recent Cracked article about things aliens should do but don't do before invading the Earth. One was "do your research."

Malevolent

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