{"id":1421,"date":"2007-05-29T17:44:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-29T17:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/?p=1421"},"modified":"2007-05-29T17:44:00","modified_gmt":"2007-05-29T17:44:00","slug":"a-little-tuesday-afternoon-memphis-typography-nerdery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/memphis\/a-little-tuesday-afternoon-memphis-typography-nerdery\/","title":{"rendered":"A little Tuesday-afternoon Memphis typography nerdery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I took to Madison avenue to get my daily picture, since I had passed by the Camp Electric Company’s building a hundred times but had never had time to stop and capture their rather rusty and Spartan sign. Nestled just next door to Camp is Sam Phillips<\/a> Recording, a legendary entity in music if ever there was one.<\/p>\n

Here’s the sign on the side of the building that faces Madison: <\/p>\n

\"sam<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s a nifty sign, and mostly pleasing to the eye. You’ll recognize the typeface used here as Futura<\/a> most likely. <\/p>\n

I like the lack of capital letters in the first three words, and then the smallcaps in the last two. I dig the completely exaggerated ascenders and descenders (made to look more like music notes, no doubt, hence why the “g” in “recording” actually resembles a “q”). But there’s one thing that kind of drives me up a wall about the type in this sign (besides the missing dot over the second “i”, which I kind of suspect has fallen over the years: The “a” in “sam.” <\/p>\n

It’s not a true Futura A. Futura’s whole reason for existing is its perfect geometric shapes: perfect circles, perfect triangles, etc., which reflected a modern emphasis on bold form and pragmatic function. That a single A could disrupt the consistency of the (almost) perfectly round counters in the sign makes me twitch … but just a little. That’s not to say the sign isn’t still a great sign \u2014 its quirks makes it endearing; the whole sign looks amateur and hand-cut, which it may very well be (I’m clueless about mid-century sign-making techniques). It’s just interesting to wonder why the A got squished. It almost looks like an issue of horizontal space, but it looks like that could have been resolved other ways.<\/p>\n

Also, on closer inspection<\/a>, the S form looks a little wider than the true Futura S, which is actually a very slender letterform. So, anyone know the history of this sign?<\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/b> Slate has some interesting type wonkery up today<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I took to Madison avenue to get my daily picture, since I had passed by the Camp Electric Company’s building a hundred times but had never had time to stop and capture their rather rusty and Spartan sign. Nestled just next door to Camp is Sam Phillips Recording, a legendary entity in music if ever there was one. Here’s the sign on the side of the building that faces Madison: It’s a nifty sign,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-memphis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-mV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}