Hand written sign research

• It’s estimated that there are about 300 full-time signwriters working in the UK. It’s a diverse group made up of experienced painters who may have obtained a now obsolete City & Guilds qualification and a young generation interested in all things bespoke

• Young graphic designers and artists are finding their way into hand-painted signs. Signwriting enthusiast Sam Roberts explains: ‘This is a generation that has grown up with computers at the heart of their work and who are seeking to engage with the physical processes that go into producing letter forms’

• Adrian Geach, a signwriter in his 50s, witnessed the demise of the industry in the mid-1980s, when the first self-adhesive vinyl cutters arrived from the US. Geach was ‘swept along in the vinyl revolution’, he says. But now he’s gone full circle and is hand-painting again

• ‘There is a certain power given off by a handpainted sign that you could never find in a modern version,’ says David Kynaston, who created this fake butcher’s sign for a step-by-step guide published in a magazine for sign writers

• ‘The UK is saturated with plastic sign companies – they are in every town,’ he says. ‘If you require something handpainted, you have to look a lot further to find a specialist tradesman’

• When you’ve got the technology at your fingertips to print signs for next to nothing, it seems like the only logical choice.

• gilding process, where he transfers 23 carat gold leaf onto a sign. He explained that there are ‘very few people left in the world who do it’, and that it’s an ‘ancient technique’. 

• Because that’s how all signs used to be made. It feels to me that we lose enough traditions anyway in day-to-day life that we don’t need to lose another one. I just think it’s a shame when we’re a country built on craft and tradition to have that happen through computers and because things are cheaper to make. That’s all that was starting to put sign writers out of business in the 80s was the fact that plotters and computers came out. It ruined them overnight. Literally overnight, a lot of places shut down. I don’t think signpainting ever [died]. It just got reincarnated in a different way. Now it’s more of an artisan, bespoke service, whereas before, it was an everyday service.

• The craft declined significantly with the introduction of computer cut plastic signs in the 1980s, and most plastic shopfronts and leasing vehicles moved to plastic signs. However, there were a number of traditional signwriters who refused to abandon the craft.

• The thing about lettering is that you are making something custom for your client.

• The great thing about lettering and sign painting is there is so much history, so many styles and techniques that you can never really learn it all.

• Tod Swormstedt set up a museum in Cincinnati in 1999 during what he calls a midlife crisis; it was dedicated to the history, technology, commerce and culture of signs and is now called the American Sign Museum.

• The revival, practitioners say, is fuelled by business owners wanting their shops, restaurants and pubs to stand out from bland and identikit neighbours. Moreover, shops competing with online retailers must work harder to get customers through the door.

• Customers want quality, says Mr Garrett, and turn to those able to paint by hand. “People want an intimacy. They want a sense of the individual.”

• “Now things have come full circle”, Mr Tanswell says. “People like the aesthetics of handmade signs. They want to see the imperfections, evidence it was hand-painted