Showerthought: A client's weird request made me see old signs in a new way

I was working on a logo for a small bakery here in town, and the owner, a guy named Mark, was super specific. He didn't want any script fonts or fancy colors. He pointed at this faded, hand-painted sign on the side of an old hardware store down the street and said, 'Make it feel like that. It's been there for 50 years and you still know what it sells.' That stuck with me. I spent a whole afternoon just walking around downtown, really looking at those old painted signs on brick walls. The chipped paint, the simple block letters, the way the sun had faded the colors. It wasn't about being fancy, it was about being clear and lasting. Now I can't stop seeing that kind of honest, no-nonsense design everywhere. Has anyone else found inspiration in something that was basically just meant to be functional?

2 comments

2 Comments

loganm521mo ago

Honestly that just sounds like making boring stuff on purpose. Those old signs are faded because they failed, not because they're smart. If a sign from 1974 is still there, it's because the business died and nobody bothered to take it down. Clear and lasting is fine, but we have better tools now. A simple, clean modern logo on a website and a bag does the same job without looking like you're stuck in the past.

pat_hart1mo ago

Yeah, my friend's old diner had a faded sign out front, and @loganm52 is right that it looked dead. But people kept stopping to take pictures of that thing, saying it felt real. Sometimes lasting isn't about being clean, it's about showing you were actually there.