We may not always register the plethora of advertising signage that are integral to our daily lives: typography is present on walls and store fronts, historical buildings and parking lots, manholes and seals, neon lights and cars, subways and billboards. If it is often "invisible" - signage is not called ephemera for nothing - it however defines a time and a place and creates a sense of identity - personal, regional, national.
Preservation of the Visual
Typography is a form of visual communication. It communicates a message ("No parking", "Beware of Dog", "Danger", "Chevrolet", "Mind the Gap", "Sprinkler Stop Valve Inside", "Emergency Exit") which names, labels, informs, warns, advertises. But more than that, typography embedded in the urban environment becomes a cultural symbol and a marker of identity. The preservation of these typographic marks - which is the preservation of the visual environment - is akin to the preservation of an important historical resource.
Signage touches on many levels of human action and interaction: printmaking, advertising, architecture, design, activism, art. The Vernacular Typography project has to do with documenting and salvaging these elements of the visual environment which are endangered by the homogenizing influences of globalization. Over the past 10 years the project contributors have assembled an archive of over 4,000 images of examples of vernacular lettering from countries all over the world, including the United States, England, Chile, Cuba and Japan.
Vernacular Typography
Molly Woodward, graphic designer from Brooklyn, New York and author of Vernacular Typography dot com, aims to preserve "these important symbols of local culture" - the weathered wooden signboards, the hand-painted signs on walls, the metal signs dangling over shop fronts. Creating signs and signage is a vanishing skill, a dying art. Ghost Signs in the UK is involved in a similar effort to preserve the vanishing wall advertisements of the urban environment.
Woodward says: "The appreciation of typography is an almost unconscious response to familiar patterns and marks. Calling deliberate attention to its presence allows us to see what is usually invisible: how the words are composed, and the power of popular type forms" ( New York Foundation for the Arts, accessed 30/6/2011).
It is often the case that one notes the absence more than the presence of a sign. Once signage that has been embedded in the fabric of everyday life is gone, it takes with it something of the past. The vanished typography has erased part of the meanings embedded in lettering. Thus, as Woodward says "documentation is a talisman against erasure."
Check the Vernacular Typography website and Molly Woodward's blog
Lito Apostolakou - Lito is a historian with an interest in digital archives and online historical resources. She is the author of blog Palimpsest.
