Search for the hashtag #typographictourism, and you'll find an informal travelogue dedicated to the lost art of signwriting. Images from across Europe, often in bespoke colourful fonts or hand-painted onto façades, business names rendered in imaginative designs. They come from Yorgo Tloupas, a French-Greek creative director with a passion for both typography (having authored several typefaces himself through his studio, Yorgo & co) and travel.
Here, Tloupas tells us of his passion, or rather obsession, for the fine, lost art of sign typography.
Some tourists travel to find the best poolside loungers, some to visit the most ancient archaeological sites; I tend to aim for the ultimate vernacular signage. My partner has become used to holiday strolls interrupted by the need to capture typographic marvels above aging stores.
A disappearing craft
From Northern Italy to the Yucatán Peninsula, the disappearing craft of independent shop branding has been a mild obsession for years. Why is that craft on the wane? How and when did a staple of all human settlements since Pompeii face extinction? Blame Steve Jobs.
The rise of personal computing, more precisely the advent of vector graphics software in the late 1980s and early 1990s, rang the death knell for local artisans drawing letter shapes on the facades of businesses, and accelerated the demise of masterful graphic artists who were the only ones able to design word marks precisely.
Suddenly your local barber could simply open MacDraw, type 'Grateful Dreads' (a real hair salon in Ann Arbor, MI), choose one of the available fonts, and send the file to the local printer, who’ll apply it to a sad piece of white PVC.
Gone were the meticulously proportioned letters made for the exact width of the façade, built in extruded metal, stone, or wood. Today, most high streets from Reykjavik to Nairobi are inundated by typographic horrors applied in the cheapest manner possible.
Stumbling upon early 20th-century pictures of Downtown Kingston in New York State recently reminded me of the infinite wealth of typographic skills that was the norm before the Mac computer gave everyone the possibility to create their own signs. An equivalent would be the advent of a machine that would allow you to design and build your car at the click of a mouse. I dread to imagine the visual mess that would result - or not.
Typographic tourism: the search for a lost art
My travels today are a mix of despair and awe. Provincial French towns have become a no-go zone for design-sensitive minds, attacked on one side by the global chains with their varying degrees of quality (thank you, Burger King, for bringing back your classic pre-swoosh logo), and on the other side by family-owned bookstores using the Papyrus typeface (made famous by Ryan Gosling's legendary Saturday Night Live sketch) and kebab eateries using as many colours, gradients and shiny effects in their name as are possibly available.
In brutal contrast, here and there survive signs with singular letterforms and elaborate construction. Turin and Genoa are still packed with beautiful neon logos in geometric script typefaces. Shops in Mérida and Campeche in Mexico are, for now, mostly using hand-painted signs, although the Mexican authorities are pushing a law to eradicate the vernacular beauties known as rótulos.
Selem cinema, Mexico City
Photographing and archiving these endangered graphic species under the moniker typographictourism has become both a pleasure and a responsibility. And all hope is not lost, as the vast majority of hip bars and matcha shops worldwide now seem to be paying extra attention to their bespoke logos and fancy signs. The signage renaissance is under way.
