Hand Painted Signs

Roman Mars:
This is 99 percent invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
If you’ve ever wondered what squirrels were good for besides being adorable, wonder no longer.

Scott Thiessen:
These are lettering quills, the brushes I was talking about. And they generally are squirrel hair.

Roman Mars:
That’s Scott Thiessen from New Bohemia Signs, a world’s famous hand-painted sign shop in San Francisco.

Scott Thiessen:
And have pretty long, very thin handles so you can twirl ’em as you’re painting like an “O” or an “S.”

Justin Green:
Look at any movie made before 1983 and you’ll see hand-painted signs everywhere.

Faythe Levine:
You would see a certain type of an “A” or a certain type of an “S” being repeated in all this different signage in certain neighborhoods and that was the first time, for me, I realized there was actually a job that was a sign painter.

Roman Mars:
It’s not as common a job these days but sign painting is still thriving. And according to some of the voices you’ll meet today, even undergoing a kind of renaissance, but let’s start with a cartoonist.

Benjamen Walker:
Not just any cartoonist though, one of America’s original underground cartoonists, Justin Green.

Justin Green:
My comic book “Pinky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary,” that’s my best-known work that I did as a young man. I can’t seem to shake the little bastard.

Benjamen Walker:
I got to see Justin speak last year at this fancy academic comic book conference in Chicago. And he gave me a book of his sign painting comics.

Roman Mars:
Reporting right there is our friend Benjamen Walker.

Benjamen Walker:
The way Justin Green tells it is one night his wife asked him how he was going to pay the bills and he said, “I’m a cartoonist” and she said, “I know but how are we going to pay the bills?”

Roman Mars:
But an artist entering the sign painter’s world had to tread carefully.

Justin Green:
Because to tell you the truth, among hard-beaten sign painters, the word ‘artist’ is a pejorative. Um, ‘mechanic’ is the term they use.

Benjamen Walker:
Justin came up with an ingenious way to have it both ways. He threw himself into the world of sign painting-

Justin Green:
And frantically reading tactical manuals written in the ’20s.

Benjamen Walker:
Hustling for work-

Justin Green:
Learning on the job.

Benjamen Walker:
Gathering tips from the elder’s statesmen mechanics-

Justin Green:
Promising more than I could deliver.

Benjamen Walker:
And he documented all of his adventures in a comic strip he called, “Sign Game.”

Roman Mars:
But the best thing about these trips is that Justin actually teaches us how to look at old hand-painted signs.

Justin Green:
I literally did that. I mean, I would stand in front of these old sunburnt signs like a history detective and I would see how good the craftsmen were.

Justin Green:
If someone was a fledgling or a drunk, you would see lots of brushwork around the tricky parts like an ‘O.’ And an ‘O’ by an old-timer was done in about four strokes amazingly. Although any neophyte can use fifty strokes to get in the ballpark but at that point, you can’t make a living so you very quickly learn how to coordinate your eye and hand.

Faythe Levine:
It’s mind-blowing to think about what was done by hand and in comparison to how things are done now.

Benjamen Walker:
That’s Faythe Levine. She just co-directed a movie about sign painters-

Roman Mars:
And also wrote a great book.

Benjamen Walker:
With a guy named Sam Macon.

Faythe Levine:
My name is Faythe Levine.

Sam Macon:
My name is Sam Macon.

Benjamen Walker:
Faythe and Sam interviewed a number of sign painters-

Roman Mars:
Including Justin Green.

Benjamen Walker:
To tell a story about a group of people who used to be in charge of how our cities look.

Justin Green:
Certain letterforms were ideal for a barbershop and yet not for a restaurant.

Faythe Levine:
Sometimes I think the most well-designed signs are the ones that we don’t even notice. Like a no parking sign, or the street signs that tell us how to get where we’re going. And so you know, we got a lot of really amazing stories about people getting jobs lettering all of the street signs for an entire city back in the day.

Sam:
This was a standalone trade. An industry that employed thousands of people that had a direct impact on or hand in defining our commercial landscape.

Benjamen Walker:
All of the sign-painters Sam and Faythe introduce us to are unique but as a group, there’s a consistency to these unique individuals. They’re-

Sam:
Characters, for lack of a better word.

Roman Mars:
Or as Justin Green puts it-

Justin Green:
Anyone in the sign field is a little bit nuts.

Faythe Levine:
We got some wild stories.

Benjamen Walker:
Many of the sign painters use their painting skills to crisscross the country. Bob Deur says that he could just show up in a town on a Greyhound bus, sleep in a field and be painting a sign the next day. It seems you can’t be a good sign painter unless you’re also a good hustler.

Faythe Levine:
You’ve got a new business site that opens, you walk in and you say “Hey! I’m your guy. I’m going to make people come into your shop because I’m going to paint the sign that people are going to walk by, stop, look at, and come in the door because it looks so good,” and that is your hustle as a sign painter and that’s what it was and that’s what it still is.

Roman Mars:
At the heart of the sign painter hustle is a promise that whatever you have me put paint on – a wall, a sandwich board, or the side of your truck – it’s going to make you and us both look good.

Sam:
I’m going to make sure that this truck stops traffic.

Benjamen Walker:
But the thing is there was never just one guy doing the sign painter hustle. Sign painting was competitive, it was very very hard to break it to the business.

Faythe Levine:
It’s like you couldn’t get hired if you didn’t have experience but they don’t want to hire someone with experience because they didn’t want them to take all the jobs. You really have to kind of earn your stripes. We’re talking about a minimum of 2 years experience to even call yourself a sign painter, and even that it could be debated. [chuckles]

Sam:
Because you need to have the necessary knowledge of how to form the letters, lay out the wordings.

Justin Green:
Certain kinds of informational signs had to be crisp and clear and a long letter form would be completely inappropriate.

Sam:
That knowledge needs to be just so baked in, that you can then apply it hanging off the side of a building in the winter, painting fast.

Justin Green:
It really is an arduous training, aesthetically and physically.

Scott Thiessen:
In the “Sign Games” strip, Justin Green tries to help us understand why things used to be done a certain way. In one of his comics, he explains why sign painters didn’t like to use the color yellow. You’re required double coating and it faded easily.

Roman Mars:
But in every single one of Justin Green’s comics, you get a sense that he is scrambling to document a world that is fading away.

Justin Green:
I felt compelled to do the “Sign Game” as a historical piece because I knew the world around me was crumbling overnight.

Benjamen Walker:
Sign painting is by no means the only industry that was wiped out by digital technology but still, I can’t help but feel extra sorry for these guys because they got their butts kicked by vinyl.

Roman Mars:
Specifically, the vinyl plotter, which looks kind of like a big computer printer.

Faythe Levine:
The vinyl plotters are machines that would basically tap out vinyl letters. You would program in, you know, “Welcome!” and then it would punch out the vinyl letters and then you’d weed out the vinyl with a razor blade and put the “Welcome!” letters onto the surface of your sign.

Justin Green:
When vinyl first appeared, no one would accept it. And yet for all intents and purposes, it was even better than the hand-painted sign because it was perfect. It was of the same color. It would weather better than paint. And for maintenance, because when the washers were enemies, it stood up to them.

Benjamen Walker:
The vinyl plotter was something sign painters really like to hate… in theory.

Justin Green:
And it was considered like, selling out, undermining your brothers in trade. But then, slowly the guys who stubbornly clung to their brushes would call the guys who had the machines when they got in a jam. And they’d say, “I’m just going to do this once, you know, but could you give me these hundred words,” and then before long everybody bought into it.

Benjamen Walker:
By the mid-1980s sign painters were no longer in charge.

Sam:
It’s a very simple story. Technology lowers the bar to entry. You got people that aren’t necessarily the most like visual people sometimes going into like a Kinko’s or a Fast Signs and saying, “These are the words.” And those were then printed out on a thing that could qualify as a sign and that’s what goes up. [chuckles]

Justin Green:
It’s like a ton of people there are thousands of fonts. Fonts named after girlfriends.

Roman Mars:
But all is not lost for the sign painters. New and old businesses who want to advertise quality and craftsmanship of the items and services inside the store want to sign that embodies that quality and craftsmanship on the outside of the store. And back in San Francisco at New Bohemia Signs, Scott Thiessen says business is booming.

Scott Thiessen:
Seems in the past 3 or 4 years has been a resurgence of especially designers with appreciated hand-painted signage. You know, the way the letters flow on the brush, you can do slight things to make the lettering look a little bit better. I think just having something that’s hand-done, hopefully, will always be appreciated. It’s depending on… you know, the pendulum always swings back and forth.

Roman Mars:
And unlike the cutthroat days of the hustle, New Bohemia now teaches sign painting classes that consistently sell out.

Scott Thiessen:
And we don’t view it as creating competition. We’re viewing it as the more people see what a hand-painted sign looks like, the more likely someone’s going to want it.

Roman Mars:
Heather Hardison is one of the young painters who took up the craft a couple of years ago and is now a journeyman painter at New Bohemia.

Heather Hardison:
Damon, who’s the owner, always says, “It’s not perfect, it just looks really good.” [chuckles] And that lends to what makes it beautiful. That little wobble is gorgeous.

———

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Benjamen Walker-

Benjamen Walker:
For the intro, I imagine “I’m Roman Mars and I’m talking about the cities and the signs, how it used to be or my deep backlit observations. Blah blah blah.”

Roman Mars:
Sam Greenspan and me, Roman Mars. It’s a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and “like” the show on Facebook. I tweet @romanmars but we have a “Sign Game” comic from Justin Green, pictures from New Bohemia, and a trailer for the “Sign Painters” movie all at 99percentivisible.org.