Year: 2018
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Light Capsules is Back (for one night only)
Tomorrow, Thursday 16 August, Craig Winslow is bringing his Light Capsules project back to London for a ‘one night only’ special reboot of the 100-year-old Barlow & Roberts ghost sign at 25-33 Southwark Street (under the railway arch). As darkness falls the sign will come back to life through a series of illuminations showing how […]
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Social Decay from Andrei Lacatusu
Digital artist Andrei Lacatusu has created Social Decay, a series of images depicting a possible future of washed-up digital companies and their derelict signs. They are ‘faux’, although in a different sense to those that I’ve documented in the past. An article on Digital Arts contrasts them “to the slick, shiny digital versions we see […]
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Brilliant at Las Vegas’ Neon Museum
[This is a reposting of the original blog post on Better Letters.] Since 1996 Las Vegas’ Neon Museum has put the city’s decommissioned signage on display in its ‘bone yard’ exhibit. It was already a ‘must visit’ lettering location but has now been boosted by an innovative treatment of the historic pieces found there. Craig […]
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64,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Cave Paintings
Continuing the occassional exploration of ‘ancient’ signs, I was thrilled to hear of this evidence that Neanderthals were busy painting the walls of caves across Spain. This species, almost dubbed Homo Stupidus (yes, stupid man!), were not previously known for this type of cultural activity, and this remarkable work has discarded that prejudice for good. […]
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Bill-Poster: A London Type
Sadly we recently lost what was one of my all-time favourite ghost signs, in the shape of the Black Cat on Dingley Road. RIP. The brand was a pioneer of cigarette cards, and their power to foster increased sales through the parallel addictive properties of collecting, and nicotine. Recently the Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life […]
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Los Angeles’ Reverse Palimpsest
This ‘reverse’ ghost sign was recently revealed in Los Angeles and provides a third example of concrete setting and holding back the paint that once covered the wall of an adjoining building. (See two more examples posted previously here and here.) Most visible are the large lower-case letters that spell ‘ella’. It isn’t clear whether […]