Letter pics, collected by @isoglosse | Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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This used to be the sign of a shopping arcade in Munich 🇩🇪
Does it look a tad old-fashioned? Yes, it does – but I think that it is lovely nonetheless, with all of its exuberant swashes. In 2018/2019, these letters were replaced by a sign using a nondescript all-caps sans.
This butcher’s shop in Reims 🇫🇷 has two typefaces on display: The red on white one is Britannic (whose cheeky ‘g’ flag I had never noticed before). The white on red one looks like some version of Albertus – but there are many versions, and I can’t put my finger on this one.
Street name plates are good. Street name plates with small explanatory plates are even better. Here we get to see the same style (more or less) in two optical sizes and, for one of the sizes, in two widths. Interestingly, the bowl of ‘a’ hovers above the baseline in all variants.
I have posted additional pictures from Mannheim 🇩🇪 on my Flickr. The collection includes street name plates and other signs. Flickr may not be the place where pictures get most views, but it is the best place I am aware of for archiving pictures.
flickr.com/photos/isoletters…
This sign is part of the Rosengarten Congress Centre in the @quadratestadt of Mannheim 🇩🇪 The building was designed by Bruno Schmitz and erected in 1900–1903. The letters were probably added later. They remind me of typefaces like Futura Schlagzeile/Display (released in 1932).
The sign above has a sibling – and I have shown it here more than three years ago 👇
I like both signs (and next time I visit, I will check if there are any additional signs in that style) – but I admit that they may not be the best fit for a building in the Art Nouveau style.
Squarish stuff from the City of Squares (@quadratestadt), albeit a few steps outside the grid. This sign may be based on an existing typeface, but it is evident from the ligatures and the way the letters fit into their context that we are looking at custom(ised) letters.
I recently passed by this sign again and still liked it, so I think I have to post it now.
It is a classic tradesperson’s sign, not age-old, but maybe a few decades (judging by the style and the condition). ‘JB’ ligatures are rare, so it is nice to see two instances of this one.
– You will never be able to fit ‘Fondazione Ettore Pomarici-Santomasi’ on that sign.
– Hold my beer …
The ultra-condensed sans-serif caps may seem like a picket fence, but the ultra-curly script is more like a soft duvet. Just sink into it.
(Oh, did you see the handmade ‘ì’?)
Not sure if they sell any interesting books – but the signage on their shop is surely worth a look. We have one M with the centre vertex on the baseline – and one with a raised vertex. We have some letters with vertical stress – and one with horizontal stress. Who needs books?!
Vereniging De Harmonie, a club in the city of Groningen 🇳🇱, was founded in 1840, but moved into a new building in 1967. The sign may be from around that time. Anyway, I love it – as I love most three-dimensional lettering. It is also nice to compare the large and small letters.
‘Mandel’ is the German word for ‘almond’. ‘Amandel’ is the Dutch word for ‘almond’. Yeah, I am easily amused, but I smiled.
Adam Mandel and his wife ran a bike shop in Alzey 🇩🇪 The letters are geometric and low-waisted – a simple, yet beautiful example of a classic shop sign.
I took the information about the shop from a charming video posted by @aznachrichten. It shows a walk through the street where the shop was located with a local. If you would like to practice your understanding of Rhenish Franconian dialects, start here: youtu.be/FMeGvot9baQ
If you know your way around the south of Germany, you can make a reasonable guess about the location of this street name plate. The letter style is as simple as it gets in blackletter – with blunt diagonal stroke endings. The Clarendonesque (house?) number is a nice contrast.
The street name ‘Blautopfstraße’ is not unique in Germany. In fact, there are two such streets: One is in Stuttgart. And the one above is indeed in Blaubeuren near Ulm (spot on, @Sparrersway). The picture below shows a sign that I saw at the train station of the town.
Is this sign beautiful? Your mileage may vary – but I think it is a beautiful addition to my small, yet growing collection of ‘Ausfahrt freihalten’ (Keep driveway clear) signs. The wide typeface used for the top line looks like (some version of) the elusive DIN Breitschrift.
This is the first time that DIN Breitschrift was featured here 👇
But wait, is that the same typeface? The only letter present on both signs is ‘a’. It is hard to say if there are more differences or similarities. We can say, though, that there is not just one Breitschrift.
And here is another sign displaying the same feature as yesterday’s (maybe executed somewhat more skilfully): a block letter ‘s’ in a (largely) connected script. As a bonus, we get an ‘F’ that is as convoluted as it is beautiful. Guess it could be used as a paper knife, too.
It is hard to integrate a block letter ‘s’ (as opposed to a cursive ‘𝓈’) into a connected script. But valiant attempts were made. Same goes for harmonising stroke widths, maybe less successfully so. Their umlaut game is stronger, with sturdy marks centred on the cap height.
If I had proper tagging on all my pictures, it would have been easy to find this sign. The tag would have been ‘Block letter s in connected script’. Well, I don’t have that kind of tagging, so I went through loads of pictures to find this one from May 2019. Cute accent, too.
@hardwig Paging you as the master of Flickr tags: Is there any tag that would apply here or would it make sense to create a new one? Suggestions welcome.