Sally Clarke and the 17m coachline

Having the opportunity to work with Pret doing all the signwriting for their Southern outlets, we soon realised how they loved signwriting on painted brick. These projects involve smaller 100mm letters up to 200mm letters painted onto brickwork. We use our paper pounce that is an outline of the letters with holes and use a pounce pad that is filled with charcoal or chalk that we rub over the drawing and it transfers the outline for us to follow. Now, these bricks aren’t real, they are brick slips, fibreglass and in some cases very distressed. They are not like old painted brick that becomes smooth with paint over the years. Using a brush over the brick gives a very rough outline of where and how the letter is formed and then we use a very small, and in some cases a tired old 3mm long brush to then fill in and push the paint into the gaps. This can take time. Lots of these Pret jobs are refurbishments so they are open during the day and we work at night and so you have to finish what you started, there is no chance of leaving half a message! One particular message, 5 lines of letters took me 5 hours to signwrite, total commitment to the job in hand, the trick is to focus and relax. Something not that easy with sciatica but a conversation with my wife, taking my mind off pain helped immensely. Signwriting is a very intimate thing – as it's just you, a brush and a wall, and the world carries on behind you as it does on these jobs with people doing other works or installing signs. At the end of the night, you can look back and admire what you have achieved and soak up all the nice comments you received while signwriting. Then, there is the 6½ hour brick. This is exactly the same message, same size, colour and 5 lines of text, the only difference is the brick. On this wall the brick is very open and porous and therefore when signwriting, the outline of the letter only puts a small amount of paint down which means more filling in with the old tired brush! I was there all night on this and so it didn’t matter. However, one thing worth remembering when pricing this type of work is that not all bricks are the same and if you are not able to see the brick type then allow for the worst case scenario, I teach this to my students all the time. The smaller lettering, normally in blue, with a red star can take 2-3 hours. The other week when on a Pret job I was told I have ‘patience of a saint’ and I agree. 😊

Nowadays we have so much at our fingertips that we are completely spoilt. I truly believe that a lot of new people entering the industry may think that it has always been this way and that we have always had routers, font finders, colour matching systems, rolls rollers and digital printers, just to name but a few. If only this was the case. I refer to it when on social media where someone was asking what the name of a particular font was. I had a look and after a few moments I remembered back to my signwriting days and recognised the font as Modern No20. Then I thought I wonder how many other people could recognise fonts. Different, when in the design industry as you are using them to create the design. But in the sign industry nowadays you see them every day, but do you know what they are. In fact with the speed of works going through on a daily basis, do people really care? There are websites now capable of recognising a font! I remember in the late 80’s looking back through a letraset book to find a font, sometimes this would take an hour or more just so we could then draw it up, by hand of course or but in some letraset and enlarge with an epidiascope. After speaking with some colleagues, not quite as old as me the other day, we said that it would be interesting if you demonstrated how signs used to have lettering applied. Not going back to signwriting but applying vinyl lettering using a scaled drawing that was done off the vinyl machine software or off the clients artwork using a scaled ruler or working out the factor. I am sure they would be amazed at how long this would take compared to applying a digital print with a rolls roller. So that also made me think of how we make signs, flat panels easy, if you have the appropriate wall saw or flatbed saw. I do remember cutting many a foamex panel by hand and have the scars to prove this. But again with the introduction of routers for cutting letters and shapes and now the amazing and extremely fast Kongsberg cutting tables, this enables extremely quick turnaround of products with excellent edge finishes. 3 dimensional signs have also come on with the introduction of automatic letter builders for 3 dimensional letters, this eliminates the use of bending and shaping the letter by hand and therefore enabling a quicker turnaround. Again over the years I have seen how this has been done by hand and appreciate the skill involved. Don’t get me wrong many companies still make them this way successfully and may not even entertain the automated option. So, it is all about appreciation, there are some companies that aren’t lucky enough to have such modern technology and some that wouldn’t even go near it. They are just happy with what they have as it works for them and has done for years. Next time you make a sign, take a moment to think about what the sign means to you, means to the client and more importantly what went in to making the sign as it could have taken 30 minutes or 30 hours depending on how you made it and what skills and technology was used.