"House Industries" is one of the oddest art books I've ever seen. House is a lettering company. They develop fonts and custom lettering styles for business. The book is all about the signs and fonts they worked on except that few (maybe none) of the fonts are printed in their entirety. it's a whole book of font fragments and a kazillion pictures of the guys who worked on them. Leafing through it is like looking at an art book with the bottom third of every picture missing and a trillion pictures of the artist.There's an occassional interesting story. It seems like House tried to turn the old Stardust Hotel sign (above, topmost) into a font. They did a good job of figuring out what the rest of the alphabet would look like (below) but when they combined the new letters they discovered that the font only worked when it spelled out "Gleaming the Cube" and "Totally Rad." Evidently most good signs don't come from fonts. You can reference a font but a good sign has to be customized.
I'm in a hurry so I'll put up a couple of interesting page fragments (below). I don't know if they're all by House.
Hi, Eddie
ReplyDeleteWow! Interesting isight - the "t"s in the Stardust sign only look good next to the "S" (or the "A") because it makes a nice negative shape. It would look really lousy next to the "D" or something else. The "fonts" below are more obviously generic, designed so they can be used in any configuration, so naturally more bland. The art of "sign painting" is yet another lost skill, displaced by the computer. Years ago my old boss worked with a sign painter - he had one of those books - but it had the whole alphabet in it, with alternate designs for several of the letters. The guy painted store windows or wooden signs - and he charged by the letter. He ruled the guidelines and roughly composed the placement of the letters in chalk, and then letterd the thing freehand with a brush. It was fascinating to watch someone with that kind of skill - but like I said there is really no job for someone with that skill today.
Kent, you bring up an important point about altering letters as needed in freehand lettering. I did lots of lettering when I drew every day for a living (I ended up having to letter, for example, every single episodic title card for Bakshi's "Mighty Mouse", and Libby Simon inked and painted my lettering onto cels, because we were literally the last two employees left in the building, in 1987. I repeated the freehand lettering task for the next season, to keep the titles consistent)But I digress and this is Eddie's blog. One of the tricks in freehand lettering, which the artist must play on him or herself, is to think of every letter the first one. This has the effect of keeping the freehand lettering alive in tone. May not work for everyone on the planet, but it does the trick for me. I never read about this anywhere but someone in history must've stumbled onto it before, perhaps. That and a buck will land you a cup of water and a parking validation at Starbuck's.
ReplyDeleteTom Minton
CORRECTION: "...think of every letter AS the first one..." I should have typed.
ReplyDeleteTom Minton
Love this post Uncle Eddie. I love my Speedball lettering books that are now so hard to find. I wonder if I can find a class on lettering for me to take ...
ReplyDeleteI love their stuff.
ReplyDeleteI'd guess they don't print all the fonts because they'd sort of be giving their business/designs away for the price of the book if they did, wouldn't they?
Kent, Tom: I love freehand lettering. Artists should never, ever use fonts for high-profile labels, posters or comic covers.
ReplyDeleteTom's idea of doing every letter as if it was the first sounds like a really usefull tip.