Public Lettering is a website that details some of the many fonts and types of lettering present on public signs in central London. Advertisements and commercial signs were ignored; the focus is on signs installed by more “official” sources. Lovely photographs.
Wayfinding in the city is a massive and fascinating topic – reading the texts and looking at the photos on this site is one illuminating part of that beautiful puzzle. Where corporate branding intersects with wayfinding is an complex problem. Related to this, I found the entry about Central Saint Martins interesting:
“As first planned the Central School of Arts & Crafts would have had carved lettering on the corner but all that was executed was the original name above the outer entrance doors. A name change to Art & Design in 1966 was ignored, but in 1989 the college was merged with St Martinâs School of Art and became part of the London Institute. The name placed outside in the early 1990s is an example of how not to do it. As with most corporate identities, this one decrees that all buildings are signed in an identical way regardless of age, history or style.”
6 replies on “Font freaks and flâneurs, unite”
A couple of saturday’s ago, on a brilliant sunny day i walked from Covent Garden, thru central london south through Kensington, Chelsea back to the place I was staying in Fulham. it took me 5 hours, with a few, or rather a lot, of stops in shops. also in a soho pub for a beer.
For the first time i figured out how london was connected to each other. On the tube, i didn’t know where i was, or what i was underneath. the distances seemed a lot further and inaccessible. it didn’t make sense why the next tube station was where it was on the map. it didn’t feel right. until i walked through overland.
just south of the Covent Garden area on Hampstead road, behind Euston station sorta, there is this monumentally huge 1920s building. it has the faces of like 10 giant cats on the front, laid into the concrete some 6 stories up, and painted. sort of a hello kitty cat, but not really. then two huge metal cats at the front. i couldn’t figure out why this building had so many cats on it. it was called "the greater london house". they call everything "house" there. seems more official and full of momentum. the house of….. is better than the jerkoff building, or whatever.
i like a lot of street signage in london, when i could find it. many times i couldn’t find a sign and didn’t really know where i was…but that was mostly ok.
Oh this is it – but you can’t really make out the cat heads…they are up on the top and look like brown somethings.
http://www.fulcrumfirst.com/html/Porfolio/Jobsheets/1322_Carreras.htm
After chewing on it, I came up with the perfect example of where corporate identity interferes with the aesthetics and visual harmony (courtesy of you, Shawn, since it’s a favourite topic of yours) – the TD building in Toronto, and the way that the original stark lettering that marked each store in the shopping mall underneath it has slowly succumbed to awful signage that is in keeping with the brand of the store. Poor Mies van der Rohe gets no respect.
Er, whoops. Correction. I walked from Camden Market. Way north. Covent Garden is in the centre of the city, near soho. These places need to be marked better, so they stick in your head and aren’t as interchangeable.
This is way cool. It’s like a site I was planning on building, only much better. Thanks, MK.
But doesn’t it seem like the decision to exclude corporate signage is an arbitrary one? The (abstract) counter-example to the TD Centre typography tragedy are the lovely old ads painted on brick (places that come to mind: Toronto’s warehouse/club district, north/west Detroit, near Chinatown in Montreal, and around Victoria Station in Manchester).