I’ve always loved this old sign on North Main Street, especially the curved arrow!
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it lit, though. I wonder if it still works.
It reminds me of the Northside Video sign, but it has to be much older.
Someone still lives in the house next door (with those deer statues..), but the lot has been empty for some time now.
Downtown Danville.
I had to drive around the block a few times before I found a good spot near Zinc this afternoon after school. It was really weird…Cars everywhere downtown…
And — whew! — you can just see the heat of the day. TG4AC!
Not sure to which “way” they’re referring, but the sign’s an excellent hand-drawn example of a text-filled shape.
A second picture for my DanvilleType.com idea. :-)
I love the hand-drawn script and the way the text starts all bold and deliberate, then thins and spreads. And by the time it gets to “CHURCH,” it’s a sans-serif block.
I wonder if it’s thematic, or if they went with a freeform, whatever-happens approach. And I wonder about the spacing. And the color choices.
It’s definitely not what you would expect out in the middle of the country.
Cool old neon sign! Not as old as it seems, though. The building was a grocery store way back when I was a little girl. I’m not sure when the video store opened (I’m thinking in the late ’80s), but it’s been closed for some time.
I love typography.
There, I said it. And now that it’s out there, I can tell you about the hours upon hours I spent as a kid and teenager writing.
Some of it was writing, as in writing something. A lot of it, though, was just writing anything. It didn’t really matter what the words said that much (although they mostly tended to be either song lyrics or some boy’s name over and over). It was more drawing than writing, I suppose … lettering, I guess you could say. I just wanted to draw the letters and words in all kinds of different ways. Still do.
I stumbled upon the ChicagoType website a number of years ago. It’s a bunch of pictures of signs in Chicago, a bunch of them old and/or hand-done, some in neon. Since then, I can’t get the idea of doing the same for Danville out of my mind.
Every time I pass an old building with fading paint on its old brick, I think, “One day, I should take a picture of that.” When I saw the pictures my dad and brother recently took when they explored a very old building and site, I thought, “Ooh! I need to go take a picture of that sign!”
So I finally did it. I stopped at a sign that I pass every day, one that I always see and think about photographing, and did more than think about it.
I haven’t bought the domain yet or anything, but it’s a start. :-)