Signs for Type

By Chris Risdon

There are a lot of ways to get inspiration as a type designer. You can make a type design completely from scratch. You can take an historical typeface from the days of yore (i.e. pre-digital age) and bring it into the 21st century with some new touches. Or you can be inspired by your surroundings, pulling in from such things as graffiti and hand-painted signs. It was that last example which lead me to design SAV Display – a typeface inspired by the local signage of Savannah, GA.

When I started to study the hand painted signage around the city, I tried to learn more about the sign painters responsible. I had a friend, Rebecca Boehm Carr, who was doing research into the actual letterers as part of her thesis project while attending SCAD. She had learned that there were three painters around town who were responsible for the 2 or 3 styles that were found as signs for local merchants. Some were originators, others copied the style, but at lower costs. Altogther, they used what were somewhat traditional typefaces, and created a slightly organic, interesting version of this. A keen eye could start to recognize who painted what, but overall they created a distinct visual style for the signage of local merchants. I thought this could make a very interesting typeface.

I started cataloging the signs around town. Auto shops, furniture stores, barber shops and restaurants were just some of the types of businesses that had this local lettering.

After an inventory of letters from all the pictures I took around town, I had cataloged examples of about 18 of the 26 uppercase letters. There were no lowercase letters, so I would need to interpret what these would look like, based on the lettering style of the uppercase letters (as well as interpret the missing 8 uppercase letters). This was actually a nice opportunity to bring more of my own design into the typeface.

After lots of sketching, plus the digital work in the computer, I had about 250 unique characters (also called glyphs). Why so many? Well, when you sell a license to a font in the retail marketplace, you don’t know how someone might use your font. Besides the letters, you need punctuation, numbers and symbols. All told, there’s at least 250 characters‚ with the possibility of more if you foresee an even wider range of uses.

In the end, I was happy with how SAV Display came out, it captured the aesthetic and spirit of the unique hand-lettered signs seen around Savannah, pulled from authentic lettering while also using some of my own design interpretation. Design inspiration is all around you, and it’s just a matter of knowing what to do with it.

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Chris Risdon is an interaction design by day and a type designer by night. He’s a lead experience designer for Adaptive Path in Austin, TX, as well as an adjunct professor at Austin Community College. SAV Display and others were a part of Chris’ MFA thesis in Graphic Design at SCAD. His retail fonts can be found on fonts.com, T26, and myfonts.com.

Words of Wisdom: Mr. Sidney J. Johnson

By Foram Shah

“It’s not Sidney Johnson, but Sidney. J. Johnson! Don’t forget the J…” This was amongst the first things that our team Walkers, learnt about Mr. Johnson. The J stands for his father, role model and politician, Mr. Joseph S. Johnson. His deep connection with the J becomes even more apparent when we visit his home and his other properties – each of them adorned with the fancy J carefully made out of metal.

Ask him about the history and his experiences along Waters Avenue and watch him go on animatedly, most of which begins with “My daddy always told me…”

Mr. Johnson was born in Savannah. Though he and his sister received their education in New York, they always came back to Savannah during their vacations, hence creating a strong bond with their family and neighbors. After completing high school, he joined the American Navy and served there till 1944, when his father bought several properties in Savannah. It is during this time that he decided to return back to Savannah and do what he was really passionate about: Real Estate.
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Planters Reconsidered

By Kate Bordine

Over the last couple weeks, Team ArtMe has been walking up and down Waters Ave to talk to local residents and business owners. Our conversation pieces are the 28 concrete planters which dot the sidewalk between Victory and Wheaton. Of this set, 6 are well cared for, and our purpose was to gauge the communities interest in the 22 seemingly abandoned planters. After the team assessed the placement and locality we decided it was time to take action. We started walking at Jerome Meadows studio, Indigo Sky, and began by simply picking up trash and knocking on doors.

As we walked we drummed up conversations with community members along the way. Most were curious observers who started asking questions about our ongoings. We then spoke to the small business owners, bridging relationships to find out their desired plans for their unactivated planters. These forgotten objects were beginning to become points of discussion. Read more

Visualizing Opportunity

GRDS 727 Information Visualization

When we first started thinking about this class the most obvious concentration was on preparing materials for the DO roundtables. However, that was primarily a temporal exercise and would only provide Waters Avenue Community stakeholders’ with more aesthetically pleasing and possibly more comprehensive repetitions of already available statistical data.

Philip Mak and Aaron Sutherlen discuss map assembly

What could we contribute to WAVE, in the long term, as well as the short-term that would inform in a different way and open dialogs of opportunity for the Conference and beyond? Following several readings, discussions and meetings with Community stakeholders, as well as reviews of previous classes and conversations with existing ones devoted to WAVE, it occurred to us that a “visual” record of the Corridor had never been pursued. Read more

Standing On The Court

By Tiffany Lindeborn

For the past 34 years, Mr. Larry “Gator” Rivers has been coaching people of all ages. After his days as a Harlem Globetrotter, Gator decided to give back. He went from coaching elementary school children to an all white girls high school team. Today Gator holds basketball classes at the Jewish Educational Alliance Community Center in Savannah Georgia. Gator also works with other youth programs including S.H.A.D.O.W. The pictures from this post show Gator working with some of the S.H.A.D.O.W. teammates in an informal setting.

At the beginning of each class, the kids practice catching, throwing and handling the ball. As Gator walks down the line he works with each kid to make sure they understand the correct motions and succeed at the given task. The first time I witnessed Gator helping each kid I thought nothing of it. He was a coach teaching his kids how to play basketball. It wasn’t until I joined his class and personally experienced his one on one approach. After several failed attempts at this particular task, Gator worked with me until I got it and I felt a sense of accomplishment and was no longer afraid to fail in front of others. Read more

A Waters Avenue Walkabout

After several weeks of intensive research along Waters, a team of graduate students in a Sustainable Practices class discovers that a series of mostly derelect planters placed along Waters years ago in a past beautification attempt have become a sore spot for many people in the community; a reminder of broken promises. Working with Visiting Artist Jerome Meadows, Team ArtMe is exploring ways in which the planters can ‘grow’ something new, exciting, hopeful and lasting…

By Sarah Tolzman

After some preliminary research, ArtMe sets out to inventory the planters. Before setting off down the road, we sat down to discuss the scope and goals of our project. Jerome lends an experienced voice to our initiative, and encouraged us to think about these key points as we move forward:

—Whatever anyone might do with these planters, it will not be an end result.

—ANY reaction to ‘planter art’ by members of the community (good or bad) has the potential to stimulate conversations about the planters that are currently nonexistent.

—Conversation indicates value, value incites input, input leads to community expression.

—This project will demonstrate a transitory precedence; a sense that Waters Avenue is in a new state of transition. Read more

Passing the Ball: Introducing Larry “Gator” Rivers

By Giang Nguyen

Larry "Gator" Rivers

Larry “Gator” Rivers, basketball legend and coach, has been one of the most supportive locals of the Waters Avenue Revitalization project. Over the past couple weeks, our team, the Crowd, has had some very interesting and inspiring talks with the man, who can be considered one of Savannah’s icons.

Gator had quite a complicated upbringing. He was born in a family with a mixed culture that included an Irish grandmother, an African American Baptist grandfather, and a very young mother.

Introduced to basketball by his mother who taught him many things that made him the man he is today, Gator holds an immense passion for this team sport. Read more

Public Art + Design Ethos

We are pleased to announce that the renowned public artist Jerome Meadows will be working with faculty and students on several levels in conjunction with DesignEthos 2012.

Jerome came to Savannah almost 2 decades ago to work on the Yamacraw Village Art Project. At the time he was based in Washington D.C. Something clicked and he began to inquire about studio space. An old ice factory, on Waters Avenue, was available and he purchased the building. The repurposed ice house is now home to Mr. Meadows, and houses his studio as well as the Indigo Sky Community Gallery. It has become a cultural focal point along the Waters Avenue corridor.

From this location, Meadows continues to work on national and international projects including the Portsmouth, New Hampshire “African Burial Ground Project,” the “Blue Ball Dairy Barn Project,” in Wilmington, Delaware and the “Together We Live/Together We Rise Project,” in Washington, D.C.

“Jerome is the quintessential connector when you think of Waters Avenue. His presence is felt on many levels and his enthusiasm is contagious,” says Graphic Design Professor Bob Newman. “We know he will bring that gift of connecting to the faculty and students working with him this year and consequently to Ethos and beyond.” Read more

collectHERE: an early response to Waters

By Annemarie Spitz | Photos by Renee Malloy

Several nights ago, I attended a neighborhood meeting for the Waters Avenue Revitalization Project. Like many of the community meetings before it, it was held at the Asbury Memorial United Methodist Church, on the corner of Waters and Henry. I sat behind my downstairs neighbors.

My initial introduction to the Waters Avenue community was through a Craigslist ad in the summer of 2011. I was still in St. Louis, far removed from the local meanings of street names on a google map. I moved into my apartment this past September, but it took four months and a chance arrangement of folding chairs in a church hall for me to realize that I was not just a graduate student engaged in an effort to support a revitalization effort, I was a member of the Waters Avenue community. Read more

Getting Acquainted

by Kelly Vormelker

I began working with Waters Avenue this past fall through a contextual research class at the Savannah College of Art and Design that was set to engage with and learn from the Waters Avenue community. Each student came into the class with assumptions and prejudices regarding what the neighborhood would hold. Some had never stepped foot on Waters Avenue, others used it simply as a thoroughfare and some knew parts of the corridor intimately. Personally, I had only casually passed through the neighborhood. I knew nothing of the character, struggle, people, blight and beauty that would soon reveal itself. Read more