My Hollywood: Then & Now

Hollywood is a study in contradictions. It’s a city that on the one hand celebrates its past, but then turns around and either ignores or vilifies it. Living here is a constant love it/hate it battle with one’s own feelings. I recently decided to jump into the fray, attending meetings with the Community Redevelopment Association (CRA) with regard to signage and billboards in Hollywood. The CRA really wants to do the right thing but for too long the residents of Hollywood have not spoken up about their needs, and so the business interests have held sway.

Walking the streets here is an assault on ones senses—billboards and signage are starting to completely take over the Hollywood landscape, turning the city into one huge canvas for advertisers to hawk their wares. Landlords make large profits from renting the walls of their buildings to advertisers, and this has gone on unregulated for far too long. It has turned a once beautiful city into the poster child for visual blight. It’s no wonder nobody walks in LA—it’s not a pleasant experience.

Although it’s not the best example of how bad things have gotten here, I thought I’d contrast an image from a postcard of Vine Street from the ’40s, with a current shot of the same street.

As one can see, billboards were not an issue at the time. Signage was well designed and often dramatic–adding a colorful and graphic component, enhancing the cityscape. The same view (below) although it is a commercial street, and not as an egregious example as I could have shown, demonstrates some of the problems that we face.

The worst one, I feel, is that buildings like this one are now being designed as vehicles to carry billboards. What cannot be seen in this view are the eight billboards that are on this one side of the building alone! Turn around and this humongous billboard is what’s in your face, and can be viewed for miles. Gone are the days when architecture was designed to fulfill the purposes of those who would occupy it. Now new buildings in Hollywood are thought of more for their advertising potential than their architectural significance. Also note the way the “Tropic Thunder” billboard obscures the historic “The Plaza” rooftop neon, and how the gargantuan billboard atop Sunset and Vine blots out the sky. Also note that the poor residents of The Plaza have their windows blotted out by a liquor ad. On a more positive note, an attempt was made to resurrect the famous “Schwab’s” logo as rooftop neon, but the business connected with it was just a flash in the pan, and disappeared a while ago.

Hollywood is considered one of the worst cities in the country for billboard blight. Various groups have sprung up to try to fight it, but it seems that for every step forward we’re able to make, we go back two steps.

Alphabet Soup Headlines at MyFonts . . . Again!

My digital type foundry Alphabet Soup is the headline feature for this Summer’s edition of the MyFonts newsletter “In Your Face“. Not sure why they like me so much, but who’s complaining?!

For All You ‘KISS’ Fans Out There…

Years ago I did the cover for Kiss’ album “Rock and Roll Over”. When I did it, I styled it after another piece I had done—a cover for the Japanese graphics magazine IDEA. Over the years this piece has gotten more notoriety (founded or unfounded) than almost any other piece of art I’ve done. I’ve done many interviews about my experience doing this cover. This short interview was done for Rockpages Web Magazine, out of Greece, which is part of their year-long special on this rock group.

Metroscript Takes On “The Incredible Hulk”

Metroscript is making it’s Hollywood debut on the big screen by appearing in a climactic scene in the Universal/Marvel release “The Incredible Hulk“. The font was used to create a large neon sign for “Williams Plumbing” that appears over the city. Check it out towards the end of Trailer 2.

“Rising Star” at MyFonts (June Edition)

A month ago Metroscript was featured in the MyFonts monthly newsletter “Rising Stars” which highlights the bestsellers among their newer fonts. To our surprise Metroscript was featured again in the just released June edition of “Rising Stars“—but in addition they are now highlighting in the newslettter my three other font familes: my take on Bank Gothic (with lowercase characters), PowerStation and Orion. Thank you MyFonts!

What I Do (#3 of 3)

Trying to cite a few sample pieces that are representative of what I do is not that easy. Although there are many common threads running through my work, much of it has ranged all across the board. Many people say they can always recognize it by “my style”, but it’s not as easy as picking out the work of many illustrators who have a style that’s clearly definable. If I had to pick out several pieces that are representative of what I do, I might select the logo I designed for the NY Knicks, one of my covers for Time Magazine, the cover I did for the Squirrel Nut Zippers CD “Bedlam Ballroom” and the treatment I created for the New York Times of the Tribeca Film Festival. These pieces are all quite different in nature, yet tied together by what I believe to be my personal graphic vision.

What I Do (#2 of 3)

I created a teeny-tiny niche for myself when I started doing “letterforms” art—this was back in the ‘70s. For me that time was a low point for typography. There wasn’t that much going on design-wise that held my interest. I felt at the time that illustration and typography/lettering were seen and treated as two seemingly unrelated disciplines. To my mind typography had become uninteresting and was hardly ever fully integrated with images—whether they were photographic or illustrative. At the time the very popular modernist movement (as typified by such designers as Rudolf de Harak and Chermayeff & Geismar) represented a way of approaching design that for me held very little interest. When I looked back a few decades at the rich history of ephemera in this country it seemed that we were in visually lean times.

Early work by Rick Griffin (l.) and Victor Moscoso (r.)

While a student at the Cooper Union I was very taken with the “psychedelic” posters that had appeared on both coasts. The work of such artists as Victor Moscoso, Kelly & Mouse and Rick Griffin had a huge impact on me with their unusual use of color and integration of letterforms and striking images. Of course I don’t think I could have verbalized any of this at the time, I just knew what I liked—and wanted to see more of those sorts of things. So I started to create custom letterform solutions, working and collaborating with illustrators—specifically Charles White III and Doug Johnson. I soon realized that I myself could also be a maker of images and so, after gaining a little self-confidence, started to take on projects where the image and the typography associated with it became more integrated with each other—at times becoming one and the same. I guess this was to become my “thing”—the integration of letter and image. Soon, other young designers began imitating what I did. At the time I kind of resented it as “plagiarism”, but I soon realized that imitation was the most sincere form of flattery. Over the years my “imitators” branched out and found their own voices. So it’s gratifying to see that in some small way I may have influenced a generation of designers.

What I Do (#1 of 3)

People are always asking me how I ended up doing what I do. They also want to know if what I do has a “name”. My intention was never to set out to be a “lettering artist”, but somehow I always gravitated towards solving communication problems with letterforms. I guess in some ways I’m a designer who works like an illustrator. I have done work of all kinds in all sizes—from billboards to postage stamps, from logo design to labels, from CD covers to signage—and then of course there’s font design.

I don’t feel it’s ever a good idea to try to fit one’s work into categories or niches: what I do overlaps several categories: illustration, graphic design, lettering, typography and font design. What I usually tell people is that I’m a “letterforms” artist—a definition vague enough not to be too confining, but at the same time giving a little more emphasis to the “lettering” part. How I ended up “inventing” this genre (I hope that doesn’t sound too immodest) is a whole other matter. I don’t want to give myself more credit than I actually deserve by focusing on this, but people are always asking how I got here . . . so, if you’re interested, stay tuned for my next post for more of the backstory.

Fame Has It’s Drawbacks…(sigh)

Something I hear quite frequently runs something like this:

“You’d have been perfect for our project, and I’d have hired you in a minute, but you know, we probably wouldn’t have been able to afford you.”

Well, many of the instances that clients believed this to be the case would actually have worked out just fine. If I had to depend only on the big-budget projects for my livelihood I’d probably go broke. The truth is I work for all kinds of clients, big, small and in-between. Many times the most interesting projects are the ones that don’t have the huge budgets. There sometimes seems to be a direct inverse correlation between budget size and creative freedom. Often we can find a way to work something out.

Just as an example, a recent project of mine was to do logos for a pair of Los Angeles restaurants—one in Beverly Hills, the other in the Los Feliz/Silverlake area—Dominick’s and Little Dom’s, two recent additions by restauranteur Warner Ebbink.

The budget wasn’t gargantuan, but we were also able to work out a situation where I was able to take advantage of his hospitality in exchange for my design expertise—it was win-win all around.

Label Treatment: “Eschatone Records”

An interesting job I did recently was for a new client in Brooklyn. I designed a record label for the independent record company “Eschatone Records” who’ve started producing old-style vinyl records. This was the type of project that I never thought I’d get to see—but the surprising new found popularity of vinyl has given this genre a new lease on life. One of the owners of the company, Jed Davis, is a big fan of record labels from vinyl’s heyday, so I had a lot of fun giving this job some of the style I remembered from the 45 RPM labels I collected as a kid. A local art space Zakka Corp. in Brooklyn is hosting an exhibition of Eschatone’s album art beginning May 23, 2008.