Signs

Thursday, February 17th, 2011 • Horrorthon Posts

No, not the odious M. Night Shyamalan movie (“My son leaves half-empty glasses of water around! And these mimes in leotards are harmed by water—that must be why they came to Earth, a planet that’s 80% water! It’s a miracle that restores my faith!” ) but my own photographs of signs I like. I’ve been interested in typography and design all my life and I’ve always been intrigued by older, largely-handmade signs that embody an advanced understanding of form, color, proportion and typographical beauty (even if the signmakers are just reproducing the trends of the day).

I started assembling these pictures a while ago, Photoshopping them only so as to remove the linear perspective from the original photographs and make everything rectilinear (and to remove the surrounding material). I started doing this in black-and-white but I just re-did the whole thing in color and it’s definitely good-looking that way. (I’ve got a bunch more that I haven’t finished yet; this is very much a “work in progress.”) I’d be interested in any opinions on color vs. black and white (or on anything else).

Black and white: http://www.jordanorlando.com/ns/signs

Color: http://www.jordanorlando.com/ns/signs_color

And oh yeah…spoiler warning on Signs. Just think: You could have had your mind blown by the incredible half-empty glasses of water that the leotard-clad mimes are susceptible to (Who would have guessed?), and now I’ve gone and ruined it.