THIS BIG SIGN signals the presence of a municipal storage facility of public documents (archives) that are often sequestered in inaccessible and out-of-sight locations. (Riverside Main Library, Riverside, CA).
We have been writing on walls since we could write and make walls and on everything else that we could get our hands on. It first came in the form of glyphs in fields and on hillsides, then hieroglyphs on monuments and tombs, then inscriptions on palaces and temples. From the beginning, we are told most writing on walls was neither formally designed nor officially sanctioned, and instead transgressive-- graffiti. Archeologists and historians recently uncovered, deciphered and excitedly reported on well-preserved, mostly mundane, sometimes raunchy graffiti at long-buried Pompeiian ruins--the ancients were just like us! Times change but it appears we less so.
WRITING on anything and everything in our environment seems to be in our nature. (Clockwise from top: ancient glyphs, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Roman inscriptions, each with a different purpose and each meant to be seen from afar).
UNSACTIONED writing on walls seems also to be in our nature. (Well-preserved ancient Roman graffiti discovered on walls in the city of Pompeii destroyed by the volcano Vesuvius in 70 AD).
Historians might know when official signs devolved from the spiritual and state-sanctioned to the merely informative. In public buildings, we are now required by law to have a sign on every door and room in the building, not to mention exit signs. Today we make large and complex buildings and complexes of buildings all of which, if poorly designed, require “way finding”, meaning signs that tell us where to go because it is not obvious where to go. In most parking garages, we rely entirely on signs to know where to go. Then there are our streets.
MOBILITY AND ADVERTISING in emerging metropolises gave us large signs—huge images and words—a heretofore unseen phenomenon within an urban (or any) environment. (Billboards in the west, above; tall walls in the east, below).
THE PROLIFERATION OF SIGNS soon obscured every surface in the city, a mess that probably contributed to the abandonment of cities for suburbia, which then not too much later received the same treatment.
Somewhere along the way, settlements developed into cities complex enough that we needed to know with some sort of written indication which street we were on and where to find the market or meeting place. Before widespread mobility by means other than our own two feet, these signs were affixed to placards on posts and corners of buildings and mostly discrete. We only needed to see them from a few feet away.
DIRECTION AND SAFETY SIGNS became a necessary and relentless feature of our environment in the age of the automobile.
LARGE SCALE GRAPHICS ON THE GROUND PLANE is a completely 20th century phenomenon, so ever-present it is difficult to imagine a world without them even though the world was without them until a century ago.
FLIGHT changed our relationship with the planet requiring writing at a scale barely perceptible by the human eye at close range and enabling writing in the sky.
Sometime in the 18th or 19th centuries when cities evolved into metropolises and our mobility expanded via the horse-drawn carriage and the locomotive signs grew in number and size. In a metropolitan marketplace, a business may not personally know its customers and want or need a larger pool of customers, hence the birth of advertising. Mobility and advertising gave us bigger, more colorful and ubiquitous signs all vying for attention. We got the tall wall and the billboard. By a hundred years ago the number, variety, technology and creativity of signs had surged.
ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY LAND ART serve spiritual and social purposes the former knowing no human being might ever perceive it in its totality (perhaps some god, yes) the latter counting on it.
SIGNS EVOLVED from mere advertising, direction and safety to icon status, a form of entertainment and an art form. (Hollywood and West Hollywood, CA).
All of this accelerated in the 20th C. with the arrival of consumer society and mass mobility. Corporate manufacturing, publishing and packaging planted the seeds for a new discipline we know as graphic design. Consumer products of all kinds, even our clothing and our bodies, are wrapped and stamped in images and labels. Airplanes and cars changed the scale of our mobility, our daily reliance on it and in turn the scale of graphics and signs. And it expanded their role to include directions and safety. Everyday we experience large scale graphics and signs on the streets we drive on and walk across. We take it for granted that most surfaces in our built environment are veneered in graphics and signs sometimes so many that all we see are them.
SEA RANCH in northern California may have been the first instance of prominent environmental graphic design in the US. Barbara Solomon authored it and went on to have a distinguished career as a graphic artist.
POP ART sequestered ubiquitous brand names and common words into controlled forms within controlled contexts in the name of high art.
WRITING ON THE WALL has evolved into a full-fledged genre in contemporary fine art (Clockwise from upper left: Cy Twombly, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Jean Basquiat).
Inevitably high art took notice. In the 1960s, Pop Artists (and others) aspired to elevate our appreciation for the commonplace by placing it in new contexts--- physical (the white box gallery), aesthetic (a real artist can transform anything into art) and intellectual (theorizing is what makes it so). Corporate signs and labels were an easy target, pithy, pungent words and mottos another. In the 1970s, the Supergraphics phenomenon turned any building, room or wall into an opportunity for large-scale mostly 2- D, boldly colored graphics and signs. How can we understand this phenomenon other than as a natural extension of an environment inundated with paint and ink? Huge printed signs on buildings and huge words, symbols, stripes and arrows painted on streets had to have normalized our relationship with supersized graphics and signs.
ONCE SPURNED now everywhere and encouraged street art has migrated from menacing to benign.
WE LIVE IN A GRAPHIC WORLD where every surface around us is an opportunity for a message.
SIGNS ARE ALL THERE IS at this intersection of two major arterials in the heart of a major American and world renown metropolis. (La Cienega Blvd at Venice Blvd, Los Angeles, CA).
Once flamboyantly transgressive (and illegal) graffiti or “street art” has today been elevated to high art (rightly so) and permitted even encouraged in cities like Los Angeles to flourish on any wall that will have it. We celebrate huge lit-up signs, tall walls and billboards in places like Times Square, Las Vegas and the Sunset Strip. (Oddly after a hundred years of been-there-seen-that these places are still somehow seen as “the future”.) We might wonder whether having normalized large scale graphics and signs we have become addicted to them: signs for signs’ sake. We might also wonder whether in our cities in our time in all the excitement of the last 100 year,s we have missed out on the wonder and the magic of cities of the prior 4,900 years without them.
INTEGRATED SIGNS can animate the architecture of a building. Those above are two stories tall and visible from the Harbor Freeway as it passes through downtown Los Angeles, CA, those below are on the back of a minimal in downtown Newhall, CA outside of LA (Los Angeles Trade Technical College above; Time Warner Cable Access TV Station below).
WHETHER APPLIED OR EMBOSSED when integrated into the architecture of a building signs need not overpower it in promoting their visibility (Costa Mesa Library).
SUPERSIZED graphics and signs communicate this organization’s standing and purpose in the world (UCLA University Extension Administration Headquarters, Westwood, CA).
EMBELLISHMENT through writing is at least as old as Egyptian hieroglyphs and medieval manuscripts—it’s the ease with which it is accomplished that is somewhat new. (Pasadena Museum of California Art).