Shop signs & shutters

Shop signs and shutter paintings found around Birmingham. This old handpainted one...I love where the paint is fading.

I would like to study arabic typography in detail at some point, I love the square-ness of the two forms on the top of this sign.

 This looks almost as if it were painted then taken apart and put back together slightly wrong...perhaps something to convert into a technique at some point.

Presumably accidental but AMAZING!











I love drippy type, I made this animation last year with chocolate:

There's a nice post from Eye Magazine here.  on greek shop signs in Athens. I love type/letterforms that become distressed and worn over time, ever changing.

I Am Love

Really liked the type combination in these titles/credits, seemed to suit the film (which on a visual level was such a celebration of italian style..without being too ostentatious) perfectly.

Earing typeface

Letterforms from found objects... Swedish studio Hjarta Smarta created three different weights using earings, lots of really nice typo work on their website.

History of the Hawk/Them Wolves/God Damn

Hand drawn poster for upcoming gig...wanted to screenprint this but funds wouldn't permit. Instead it's photocopied on to sugarpaper and then coloured by hand with watercolour. 24 produced in total, quite time consuming. The photocopy toner doesn't quite fix to the sugarpaper so they get slightly worn from handling which I quite like. Type is all heavily Bodoni-inspired.

On wolves still...an idea drawn from the paper strip letters I was working with before, a bit Alex Trochut perhaps.

Letters from the seaside...

Went on a phototrip to Weston-Super-Mare over the weekend, these are whole words rather than letters, but I like them none the less. More photos from Weston on my Flickr.

Spaghetti Junction

At the end of the canal walk we reached Spaghetti Junction...it was just getting dusky, there was no one around apart from the cars above us and it felt quite post-apocalyptic.

The junction itself kinda reminds me of the driving scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris:

Yellow Submarine

Watched Yellow Submarine for the first time in a long long while the other night...this was pretty much my favorite film when I was a kid. It dawned on me half way through that it might have at least been party responsible for the love of illustrative typography that I have now, as it's full of beautiful hand drawn type. The number sequence that comes in at about 1:30 in this clip (also pictured below) is particularly brilliant:

 

The 1968 film was directed by animation producer George Dunning,working closely with illustrator Heinz Edelmann who was responsible for the amazing character designs. There's an interesting obituary to Edelmann here.