As a complete rethink of public behavourial signage, a system of modular typographic in-ground signage plates were designed and installed in Frankston, a southern suburb of Melbourne. Taking a far more polite tone than the usual regulatory voice reminds the public as to the reason to ‘do the right thing’. Commissioned by the Frankston City Council, it is part of a bigger public strategy project addressing how people think about and use their local area. As the municipal bylaws often change from area to area, it was important that the plates work in singular configuration (below) as well as a set of multiples (above). The term please, please smile lends a more optimistic tone to the presence of the signage.

Built as a paper city to reflect the rich storytelling aspects of over 170 years of council correspondence, the exhibition Paper City was a curational collaboration between Stephen Banham, Christine Eid and Andrew May. Commissioned by the City of Melbourne, the project involved many months of researching the archives and collections held by the council. More information can be found here including a wonderful short film of the exhibition installation. The exhibition resulted in record patronage to the City Gallery and fostered a great deal of public interest in the letterhead as a form of cultural expression. 

A new book reveals the history of many of our best-loved neon signs, writes Ray Edgar.

Bright lights. Big city. It’s always been a seductive combination. While neon may help signify a metropolis, there is a unique poetry to every city’s night sky. Where else but in Melbourne would you have once looked across the skyline and seen Allen’s, Skipping Girl, Slade Knitwear and Craven A? Sceptics may scoff, but it’s too simplistic to dismiss such advertising signs as capitalism writ large and insidiously across the globe. “At some point, signage and letterforms transcend their origins in advertising and create cultural markers of location and memory in our lives,” says Stephen Banham, author of Characters, a new book on Melbourne’s typography. “When those signs are removed or destroyed, we lose part of our collective memory and the continuity with a sense of place.” He’s not alone in his beliefs. Proof of the long-held, deeply felt passion for our city’s street signage is in the activists who fought and preserved signs for Slade Knitwear (RING, Residents in a Neon Glow), Pelaco (Get Shirty) and the Skipping Girl (Friends of Audrey).

But it’s not just flashy advertising that excites Banham; it’s signage in all its incarnations, from the hand drawn to the high tech, from manhole covers to the bolder neon on our skyline. Described by some as a typo-archaelogist, to others he is a type evangelist. However you describe this graphic designer, it’s a broad church over which he presides, and there are rich diggings to be unearthed, from the city to the boondocks. Characters, which Banham spent three years researching, is part of his ongoing ambition to make graphic design more accessible to the public. “It’s deliberately not geeky,” says the graphic designer and lecturer in typography at RMIT. “I didn’t want it to be the font nerd thing — identifying each and every individual font. That’s one of the fastest ways to destroy a good story. This book is very much about the content rather than the form.”

Featuring some 100 signs, Characters traces the evolution of the Allen’s Sweets sign on Southbank (which was added to over the years before it was demolished), revisits fears that letters from the Nylex clock, eroded by wheat dust, would eventually fall down and crush someone; and relates the mystery of the Skipping Girl — nobody knows who she was modelled on, although likely candidates are real-life girls Alma Burns; Kitty Minogue, sister of Jim Minogue, who sketched the winning entry in a design competition; and Irene Barron, a junior artist at Claude Neon, the company that built the sign. (Barron once said, “I had to skip because I was the youngest so I skipped to get the animation of the frock, the rope and my feet.”) It’s also a mystery why there was a skipping girl at all — what it had to do with vinegar is anyone’s guess. Like the nostalgic narrator contemplating the Nylex clock in Paul Kelly’s song Leaps and Bounds, Banham remembers just about everything: how many times the Pelaco sign features in the film Dogs in Space, which part of AC/DC’s Long Way to the Top film-clip features the Graham Hotel in Swanston Street …

Among the many lesser-known landmarks are those that have disappeared, such as former    signage    spectaculars from confectioners Allen’s and MacRobertson’s. Others just need to be searched for, such as Bourke Street’s Diamond House with its “Fred Flintstone” type, or the thread of evidence left behind the Adelphi Hotel’s angled signage, which reveals the former business of rag trader Ephraim Yoffa. Others, such as the once-planned neon Chloe atop Young and Jackson, need to be imagined. Banham also has a fondness for more obscure signage. Driving along the Western Highway, across the desolate plains of Rockback, he spotted an old toilet block identified in handpainted “safari” type. It was the remnants of a long-forgotten lion park, which led Banham to uncover an old rivalry between two long-gone theme parks, Bullens and Ashton’s (up the road).

“The sign is trying to communicate this sense of adventure and the exotic, and yet the truth of it is that it’s a toilet block in a very depressing, flat area of outer Melbourne,” he says. “It will only be a matter of time before the toilet block is knocked down and it becomes a housing estate. So it’s important to capture these things before they go.” While marvelling at the safari type on the suburban savannah, Banham began to feel strangely close to his home town. “I began to think this project has taken me to places I’d never normally go,” he reflects. “And I realised that’s what the book is about. It’s about making discoveries about a city you think you know.” A perfect example of the big game to be bagged is Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony’s 1924 Capitol Theatre on Swanston Street. The celebrated building with its iconic ceiling has had several signage makeovers on its entrance. In an attempt to make the building continually contemporary, its name has been reinterpreted with a faux art-deco font on the awning sign, a 1950s wild west-style font in the arcade floor, and 1970s space- age type on the walls. With Banham as guide, the curious can track the original signage to a corner behind the building where, mounted like a trophy, there is a relief panel with the Capitol’s name. The Capitol featured on a recent tour of a dozen signage landmarks that Banham hosted during the Melbourne Writers Festival. Of the 40 attendees, says Banham, only two were graphic designers.

Just as the Melbourne Open House series this year saw 100,000 visitors peek behind the facades of our inner-city buildings, Banham sees a growing interest in our signage. “People are really eager to learn more of the hidden narratives concealed down laneways,” he says. “After the tour, people spoke about their memories of those signs or its significance to their parents,” he says. “Signs are a reminder of the way we think and feel emotionally about a city.” Banham’s Characters alludes to type and people, including Ian “Podgy” Rogers, a neon maintenance man whose anecdotes are as colourful as the signs he worked on. “The Craven A Filter was one of the largest roadside signs ever made,” he recalls. “It was just over Princes Bridge at the start of the railway. Had over 800 bloody globes in it. Late one night, I was working on it and I was that bloody tired. Rang my missus and said, ‘I won’t be home tonight. I’m going to sleep with this sheila called Craven A. She’s cravin’ for me.’ “She asked where I was and I said, ‘I’m sitting up in the sign above the Yarra River and I’ve got about an hour of work to do. I’ll have a sleep here tonight.’ So I crawled into the corner, put my toolbag under my head and didn’t wake up until eight the next morning.”

If Banham was a character, his proselytising enthusiasm for neon signs might make him “bold italic”. A few years ago, he gained international notoriety (in, admittedly, fairly rarefied circles) through a quixotic campaign called Death to Helvetica, his gripe with the popular Swiss typeface being that it had become the default font since its invention in the ’50s. “It was so prevalent it was deadening the landscape.” In many ways, that’s what he fears will happen with signage today. Branding was once all about one distinctive message. Now the technology
evident on signs such as the one above Young and Jackson allows us to flash a multitude of images without fixing on any. We are perhaps more visually sophisticated and technologically advanced, yet Banham argues we lose a part of our cultural identity because of it. Inevitably, there are also many who loathe signage. While illuminated signs look great at night, even an apologist might despair at the web of unsightly scaffolding during daylight hours. “During the 1960s there was an intense period of pulling down signage,” says Banham. “Architectural theorists like Robin Boyd were absolutely rallying against that blight on landscape. Now we appreciate letterforms are part of our urban landscape, not an ugly addition to it. It would be a mistake to say this is a Melbourne style because you can’t flatten it that way. Melbourne is a big city that keeps changing.” Meanwhile, Banham fantasises about an equivalent to Earth Hour which celebrates our dimmed but not forgotten signage and in which, instead of turning off the lights, all the neon goes on at once, igniting another dada poem, an abstract ode to Melbourne.

Commissioned by Object Gallery (Sydney) to create the titling for an exhibition on sound and typography was a very enjoyable experience. The area for the titling was rounded and so the typography was designed to act in a very sweeping fashion to the viewer.

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The Age published an extract from Stephen Banham’s new book Characters: Stories revealed through typography.

Frozen in type

First proposed in 1926 but not constructed until 1955,¹ the Campbell Arcade (also known as Degraves Street Subway) was built just in time for the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games to assist city commuters bypass crowds and readily access Melbourne’s main railway station, Flinders Street Station. It features black granite columns and pink granite flooring and wall tiles, and was admired at the time for its neat shops and show windows. Once a bustling thoroughfare, the arcade suffered a dramatic drop in patronage after the opening of the city train loop in the early 1980s. After decades of neglect, the arcade now offers a unique glimpse of what Melbourne looked like over 50 years ago.

This largely original mid-twentieth-century design environment also features many frozen typographic details. The elegantly curved, three-dimensional signs gesture towards an alcove where public telephone boxes once stood, a reminder of an era before the advent of mobile phones. As well as offering convenient train commuter access, Campbell Arcade was positioned directly underneath the Mutual Store, once Melbourne’s largest department store.

Remnants of signage gesturing to the store can still be seen curved around the salmon-coloured, tiled walls, pointing absurdly to a sealed blank wall. When it was first built the arcade’s large inset glass cases, running along half its length, displayed Mutual Store products as it led customers up a stairway into the magnificent grand emporium. These cases now have a new purpose – exhibiting art to the sometimes bewildered, sometimes receptive, flow of rail commuters who use this subterranean short-cut. With the decommissioning of the arcade railway booking office in the 1990s much of the hand-painted copperplate lettering was lost. More recent and equally appealing typographic expression can be found in the resourceful signage of the various small independent boutiques that now line the arcade. The sign announcing a price rise from $12 to $15 at the hairdresser, A Touch of Paris, is indicated in the most direct way possible – by simply turning the numeral upside down.

The story of the ‘lost’ bowling alley
For many years people have speculated that there is an old abandoned underground bowling alley accessible through the Campbell Arcade. Council records indicate that a bowling alley was indeed built in the basement of the Mutual Store in 1964 for a sum of £10,000. Creating leisure experiences in city stores was common at a time when the appeal and convenience of suburban shopping centres was starting to draw shoppers away from the city centre. Sadly, after only a few years the bowling alley was closed down and has since faded into city folklore.

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Speed reading

For centuries shop signage was designed to attract the slow-moving passer-by, displayed at eye level and viewed at a casual walking pace. Signs were made to human scale. In the mid-twentieth century something completely changed this relationship – the automobile.

Many saw this development as ‘a rude assault on the conventional boundary between neighbourhood and street – neon company logos, massive advertising hoardings and catchy slogans all competed to catch the eye of the speeding motorist’. However, others saw it as a great opportunity, and so this new mobility was serviced by a rash of new suburban shopping centres, drive-in movie theatres, freeways and motels. The first motel to be built in Victoria, the Oakleigh Motel, was noted as much for its typographic signage as for the popular offerings it boasted, such as ‘Your car in your bedroom’ (meaning that guests could park their cars at their door for easy access).

The motel’s graphic immediacy was unashamedly American in influence – feeding scorn from architectural critics such as Robin Boyd, who derided this new colourful and often garish form as ‘Austerica’. The motel was the brainchild of Cyril J. Lewis, ‘formerly well known in the car-selling game’, who had toured throughout the United States, inspecting motels and gathering inspiration for building one in Melbourne to coincide with the 1956 Olympic Games. Unfortunately, delays in constructionmeant that the motel was not finished until 1957. This was a great disappointment for the entrepreneurial Lewis as he could not capitalise on its very deliberately chosen geographic location– the exact spot where the long distance Olympic marathon runners turned around to return to the city. Such public exposure would clearly have been great publicity for this statement of international modernity. After all, it was signage, especially illuminated lettering, that was so closely associated with modern design in postwar architecture, allowing shops and businesses to boldly advertise their location and function, day and night.

In the case of the Oakleigh Motel, the building itself was almost dwarfed by its broad and brazen billboard-style signage. Above the office area was a sloping panel with the words ‘oakleigh motel’ emblazoned in red letters, set forward off the wall and illuminated at night. After the initial construction, a further large rectangular neon sign was added to the roof with the word ‘motel’ and an arrow featuring the word ‘oakleigh’  down one side.

Despite its unique typographic offerings and its status as Victoria’s first motel, a battle waged for many years over whether to protect the Oakleigh Motel or demolish it. In defending the motel, the National Trust, stated: The Oakleigh Motel is the earliest, most famous, and remarkably intact example  in Victoria of the new ‘Motel Hotel’ concept. It is also an important example of the colourful, eye-catching roadside architecture typical of the 1950s. However, such significance provided no protection and in 2010 the Oakleigh Motel was stripped of much of its original features to be developed into townhouses. Currently only part of the façade remains, giving the viewer little insight into its earlier modern splendour.

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(Faux)nts of fancy

So seduced by technology were people in the early days of printing that it was said: ‘If it’s in print, it must be true’. A similar thing was even said of online information in its infancy. Even on our streets not every typographic environment you see is quite what it seems. Enter the phenomena of (Faux)nts – the false world of typography.

The White Mouse
Near the Abbotsford Convent in inner-city Abbotsford, stands a small building, its signage written in French. A typographically ornate set, it was designed for the film White Mouse (1987), replicating a French country town under Nazi seige during the Second World War. The film tells the story of the New Zealand-born Nancy Wake (1912–2011), who fought in the French Resistance under the code name ‘White Mouse’. Although not an authentic feature of the 1863 Convent, the faux signage has now been embedded within the building’s history by being protected by a strict heritage overlay whereby it cannot be altered or removed. Considered by many to capture a European nostalgia and romance, the signage now has a second life – as one of the most popular backdrops for wedding photography in Melbourne.

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For the full stories and images, buy the book from here.

The special preview night of the Characters book took on a distinctly neon glow, thanks to the monumental Astoria Taxis sign. Recently restored by Kevin M Gange from Silver Top Taxis, this amazing typographic structure made the perfect backdrop for an event staged to celebrate the contributors and friends of the three year book project. And after the night, it was very easy to find a taxi for the ride home. Thanks to all those who made their own special contribution to the book. Event photography by Andrew Lloyd.

The product of three years research and writing, Characters presents extraordinary stories behind the signs seen around a city, in this case Melbourne, that have shaped its character and its intriguing history.  The 272 full colour pages of this major undertaking offer a whole new way of looking at the familiar. The author will briefly discuss the book at the event.

On the night one lucky person will win their very own Characters lightbox.  A limited-edition tote bag is included with every book sold at this event.
The Characters book cover comes in two flavours – blue/red as well as pink/green.

Thursday 15 September, 6.00pm
State Library of Victoria Readings Shop

Although this is a free event, best to book on 8664 7540

Bringing together an artist, an architect and a typographer, we ask the question What can signage and its type styles tell us about the identity of a city?

Stephen Banham, author of Characters: Cultural Stories Revealed Through Typography, chairs a discussion with contributors Jon Campbell (artist) and Neil Masterton (Design Director, ARM Architects).

One session only.
Sunday 4 September at 2:30 pm
Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, Federation Square, Melbourne
Purchase tickets here

Visitors to the first typo-tour commented:

“Just wanted to reiterate how enjoyable your tour was on Saturday as part of the MWF. Vast amounts of research proved useful, and I look forward to reading the book itself”

“Thank you again for an excellent tour yesterday. I’m really looking forward to delving into the book and looking at my city through a completely new lens.”

One session left: Friday 2 September from 4pm-5.30pm. Federation Square Atrium, Melbourne.

Ticket price includes afternoon tea in the Fed Square Atrium at the conclusion of the walk. With limited numbers, book here.

Characters: Cultural stories revealed through typography presents an extraordinary way of looking at urban space, through its letterforms and the cultural stories behind them. What is it about letters that help give us a sense of place and a sense of self? The places, experiences and stories are unique to Melbourne and Australia, but the broader ‘way of seeing’ is as universal as the human appeal of storytelling. Rather than presenting the new, Characters offers a new way of looking at the familiar. With the assistance of researcher Christine Eid, the rich selection of stories have been brought to life by Stephen Banham, author of over fifteen publications on typographic culture. 

Characters will appeal to anybody with a curiosity about their own city, architecture, and social history as well as anyone with an interest in design, graphics and typography. More info available on the Characters site where you can see a behind the scenes film, view lots of spreads, read sample stories and find a list of stockists for the book.

ISBN 9780500500262 Price $49.95 AUD. Hardback 272 pp Published by Thames & Hudson, Co-publisher: State Library of Victoria. Media Enquiries Michelle Brasington, Thames & Hudson m.brasington@thaust.com.au

Commissioned by the Australia Business Arts Foundation from 2003 to 2007, Letterbox produced a comprehensive design suite for awarding those who have been brought together productive partnerships between the arts sector and their business counterparts.