Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

When I arrived in western Pennsylvania 50 years ago, advertising sales for our little cable TV channel were handled by one William C. Wilson. He had preceded me as the caller of numbers on Cable 3TV Downtown Bingo Party Time.

At one point Bill ran for city council. He had a background in show business, having been the manager of the local movie theater. The sign on its marquee consisted of movable letters.

Bill also knew how to paint letters. For larger signs, he showed me a centuries-old method beginning with sketching the image on a big sheet of paper (a “cartoon”), then using a pounce wheel to prick holes along the outlines. Taping the paper onto the signboard and bouncing a bag of powered graphite over the perforations would create a series of dotted lines on the signboard. Then all he had to do was remove the paper and paint between the lines. Leonardo knew this technique as spolvero.

Many small signs and backgrounds adorned our studio. Below are some more examples.

Nowadays there's less need for traditional sign painters. For example, a mile down the road from me is Most Blessed Sacrament Church, along with its attached St. Joseph High School.

By 2020, weekly Mass attendance in the Pittsburgh Catholic Diocese had dropped by 70% in a decade.

Collections were falling, costs were rising, and priests were hard to find. It was necessary to downsize.

Therefore, six parishes in this area were combined to form the new Guardian Angels Parish, and four of the six buildings were closed. Now services are held only at Most Blessed Sacrament and one other church seven miles away.

New signs were needed to identify the revised organization. But they weren't painted directly onto existing surfaces. Instead, they were printed onto large sheets which were then attached. Should circumstances warrant, the new signs can easily be removed and replaced.

Likewise, race cars now display sponsors' logos and designs with “wraps” instead of complicated paint jobs.

Wraps are sheets of vinyl film, precisely cut and attached to a vehicle's body panels using a heat gun and mild adhesive. They're durable and relatively affordable. You could put a decorative wrap on your car and it would last about five years.

And speaking of your car, if you were to pass a newfangled LED sign you might glance at it quickly and get the general idea. But the information changes eight times a minute! And the advertisers insist on including a lot of information. Their ad designs are better suited for print applications than for billboards. Due to the brief display time, if I were writing an ad to appear on one of these signs I think I would limit myself to five words.

Maybe you're actually interested in renting a dumpster. But where can you find one? Do you have time to write down the phone number 724.919.2838 or the web address phillitup.com? No, you're driving!

Do you remember the Restaurant Week address, VisitButlerCounty.com / RW?

You smile at the tasty-looking pizza, but do you read the fine print? Do you notice that it's available at Tony's Café in Sarver, PA?

The complicated ads change every 7½ seconds, and it'll be several minutes before they come back around again for another inspection. But, of course, everything in this world is temporary.