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April 13, 2008
Bankfield Mill writ large
First find a nice flat long thin bit of wood, say an old 1930’s wardrobe door, give it four coats of primer and two coats of gloss.
Then pick your typeface – and I use the word advisedly. Computing has given us many exciting new words, but it’s misconstrued a few along the way. Maybe it was just to save space on the menu bar, I don’t know, but now people always call a typeface a font, when it’s not.
A font is the collective noun for all the bits that go to make up one size and style of a typeface. One typeface can have many fonts: bold, italic, condensed, 10pt, 11pt, 12pt. Helvetica is a typeface, Helvetica 24pt, extra bold condensed is a font. But I digress.
Choose your typeface.
Gill Sans, though elegant was too long for the sign, Helvetica, bold condensed fitted the panel but was too modern for a nineteenth century mill. Times Roman, I felt, was a bit formal. So I went for Baskerville, which was designed in 1757, by Mr Baskerville himself, which is appropriate for a building built in 1826.
I laid it out in Adobe Illustrator, set the size and spacing – or, as Mr Jones would say: kerning, because he knows about these things – then I projected it onto the panel and drew round the letters.
Time was I did this sort of thing by hand, enlarging each letter by eye and arranging them on the panel.
But that takes ages. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?
Posted by john at April 13, 2008 10:42 AM
Comments
Ooooh, good choice.
Posted by: Flossie at April 13, 2008 03:37 PM