Art Imitates Life...Imitates Art (Canter's Truck #3 of 3)

SignQuest was the company that RoadStoves had recommended to "wrap" the truck with the graphics I had designed. They produce large scale banners and signs as well as vehicle wraps. One interesting project they were recently involved with was wrapping the Hollywood Sign for the "Save the Peak" campaign. The goal of this campaign is to raise funds to purchase the land adjacent to the Hollywood sign. Hopefully this would prevent commercial development that would permanently mar the view of the iconic sign and the world-famous silhouette of the hills that frame it. Wrapping the Hollywood Sign was a complex project, but wrapping a truck properly is also difficult and time consuming. Getting it right means placing the many strips of 3M Controltac vinyl film in the right positions:

Louie Navarro is seen above carefully positioning the vinyl on the service side (the side from which the food will be served) of the truck. He must carefully gauge where to position the film at the back of the truck so that the graphics end up at the right spot by the time they reach the front.

Over on the driver's side, Louie positions the main graphics. There are many ins and outs to the truck surface, and the Controltac film is flexible enough to conform to them all, ending up looking very much as if it had been painted on. It's pretty amazing.

Here's one photo of the driver's side. I'll post more photos from different angles as they become available.

In the meantime the  Canter's Truck has begun cruising the streets of LA with Bonnie Bloomgarden at the helm. To find out when they're going to be in your area you can follow them on Twitter.

Photo: Adam Stein

Coming Soon . . . Canter’s Truck Post #3 of 3

Due to my inability of being able to get good photographs of the completed Canter's truck, I'm holding up posting the final chapter in this saga. I hope to be able to get some better shots by the end of this week. If not I'll just post what I've got.Thanks for your patience!

Above: Careful placement of my credit below the trash receptacle.

Art Imitates Life...Imitates Art (Canter's Truck #2 of 3)

Although most of the food trucks are similar in appearance, many contain details that slightly alter some of their proportions. So it became necessary for me to visit the Road Stoves truck depot and to take pictures of the truck that would be closest to the one that Bonnie would be getting, and to use those photos as templates for my design—I'd also have to Photoshop out the existing graphics, making the truck as clean as I could to act as a blank canvas for my new design:

I set about to create the elements for the truck wrap, basing the graphics on the look of the Canter's neon sign and my font Deliscript. I felt I needed to modify Deliscript a bit to make this a strong graphic statement—kind of like a logo for the truck. So I began by creating a large, circular initial "C" in Canter's—and that became the basis for the look:

I also settled on a palette of colors that I felt would be attractive and reflect what I thought of as a Deli aesthetic. The unique double "SS" in "DELICATESSEN" was borrowed from the neon sign—one of many small details that I felt would help keep continuity between the restaurant and the truck. I added some other elements such as "Since 1931" that Bonnie wanted. In my first iteration for the truck my feeling was that I'd try it as a white truck—a good clean look— and adjust the graphics accordingly.

I might've had the Good Humor truck from my youth in Brooklyn in mind:

Nevertheless, a white truck wasn't exactly what Bonnie had planned on. I have to admit that I'm glad she pushed me to do a more colorful truck. Even though the truck was to be treated as a "vehicle wrap" by SignQuest, a process that is being more and more widely used, I decided to treat the truck as if I was designing a paint job in order to give it a look that was more in keeping with its mid-century heritage. Keeping the color palette that I had first come up with I created some mock ups that I thought would work even better for Canter's than my all white version:

We also decided that it would be a good idea to have a slogan and, after much deliberation, settled on "...home of the Kibitz Room". The Kibitz Room is the dive bar/cocktail lounge that's off in a corner of Canter's Deli. Like Canter's, it's an LA institution that just seems to keep going and going.

I had envisioned that we would somehow use my very graphic take on the neon baker sign on the service side of the truck. So I put him on the door and let the steam from his platter trail back along the length of the truck towards the menu. Along the top of the truck yet another version of the Deliscript/Canter's logo:

In “Art Imitates Life…Imitates Art #3″ I’ll post photos of the actual truck wrapping, and also of the finished truck.

Art Imitates Life...Imitates Art (Canter's Truck #1 of 3)

Recently I had a strange (and kind of wonderful) confluence of circumstance—combined with a smattering of coincidence and random luck. It all started right here in this blog over a year ago when I started sharing my thoughts about creating my new font Deliscript. In the posting I mentioned how the design was "loosely inspired by one of the signs at Canter’s Deli", a Los Angeles staple for almost 80 years:

At any rate my good fortune with Deliscript began about two months ago when I learned that it been selected by the Type Directors Club in NYC for inclusion in their annual show. About a month later I got a call from Bonnie Bloomgarden, the great-granddaughter of Ben Canter—one of the original Canter Bros. She and her sister Dena were trying to do a few things to gently update the Deli, while still respecting its heritage. One of their ideas was to create a "Canter's Truck" and take advantage of the recent mobile gourmet food trucks craze. A lot of the newer trucks have been completely "wrapped" with colorful graphics using fairly new printing technology.

She told me that they had started looking for fonts to design the wrap for the truck themselves, but then realized it might be a little difficult for them without having a lot of graphic design experience. Then fortune smiled on Bonnie and Dena when they did a web search Googling "Deli" and "Font" and ran smack into Deliscript (probably because of the Canter's mention in this blog) and then in turn found, and contacted me.

It has been a real pleasure working with Bonnie, a young person with good entrepreneurial instincts that are combined with a keen sense of what is worth keeping in the Canter's visual vocabulary, and what perhaps should be let go. We both concurred that the truck identity should be based on that neon sign, and that I should use Deliscript as the starting point. I also suggested that we somehow should try to incorporate into the truck design their famous neon chef, who for years has been carrying that platter of freshly baked bread:

At first I tried to graphicallyt recreate him pretty much as he was for the side of the truck. I soon realized that my rendition seemed far too literal for the look I was going for. Then, in an old matchbook catalog, I found a cut of a little round chef carrying a platter of turkey, and decided to use that as the basis for creating my updated baker (a little slimmed down) for the door of the truck:

In "Art Imitates Life...Imitates Art #2" I'll discuss how we created the design for the truck.

Alphabet Soup Fonts In Use

From time to time people send me (or I find on my own) examples of how other designers have used my fonts. Sometimes these samples are really wonderful. So when I come across examples that I feel are unusual, different or extremely well-done, I'd like to post them here. Recently I posted an example of how Metroscript was used in the movie "The Hulk". I would welcome submissions from anyone who would like to email them to me. My first posting in this series comes from Switzerland and was sent to me by its designer. The font is again Metroscript. Usually I'm not a big fan of extruding type dimensionally—I'm kind of a type "purist". But I thought that this one was done really well, keeping it simple and avoiding the temptation to just keep going and going. I love its simple colors and clean lines. Somehow the designer has taken what I feel is a very "American" font and imbued the design with a very European flavor.

It was sent to me by Bernhard Huber who asked that the credit read as follows— Design: Medienbau, Agentur für Konzept und Design, Switzerland

Announcing Grafika: It's a New "Old" Font . . . (or is it an Old "New" Font?)

I'm very pleased to announce the release of Grafika, a font design that has been "in the making" for many more years than I'd care to remember! It can be purchased from Font Bros, MyFonts, FontShop, Veer and YouWorkForThem.

Grafika began its genesis when I received a call to work on a feature film. That phone call came from Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, the reknowned team who have given us such films as "A Room With a View", "Howard’s End" and "Remains of the Day". The assignment was to create a title treatment for their upcoming film "Savages".

The title treatment (above) that I created to reflect the Art Deco sensibility of the film was so well received that it was decided that we would emulate its elegant, elongated look in all the typographic elements of the film. To do that I needed to create what would be my first complete font design. So taking my design cues from the logo I had created, I put pencil to paper and came up with a basic character set. Then I inked it on vellum (which was as hi-tech as it got at that time), and had it photographed and positioned on a roll of Typositor film.

Over the years I had forgotten about this font design. My career became totally about assignment work. I hadn’t gone back to designing fonts until recently when I started doing it again under my foundry name Alphabet Soup. Recently I unearthed a poster for Savages which contained all the credits set in that nameless font I had designed for the film. Looking at it again after all these years I realized that for a young designer this hadn’t been bad. So I decided to revisit it, and to add Grafika to my collection at Alphabet Soup.

To see Grafika in more detail, you can download the PDF brochure I've created (3.5 MB). As always, I welcome your comments!

Metroscript a "Rising Star" at MyFonts

In mid-March I began selling my Alphabet Soup fonts through MyFonts. To my surprise, in that short period of time "Metroscript" rose to the top of their list of "Starlets". The Starlets list ranks all fonts that appeared on MyFonts within the previous 50 days according to their sales volume. MyFonts just sent out their May newsletter Rising Stars highlighting the best-sellers among their new fonts, and I'm proud to say that Metroscript is prominently featured.

This is all very gratifying to me—I arrived at font design by way of my career as a lettering artist—which is not the route taken by most font designers. Font design is a very different discipline from lettering in that it is a much more disciplined craft. I can make a piece of lettering sing by using all kinds of tricks and devices to create visual excitement. It does take a keen eye and lots of imagination and know-how to make a piece of lettering stand out, but font design is much less forgiving: you are limited to one letter next to another in a straight line, and every letter in a font must be in harmony with every other letter. I think much of Metroscript's success has to do with the fact that I brought a lettering artist's eye to a font designer's craft, and I think this may be appreciated by those who are looking for something a little different. I've been told that copy set in Metroscript resembles hand lettering more than any other font.