this seemed an appropriate topic to blog on a friday afternoon. the ‘anti social’ drinking sign was a real fun project that scarborough borough council set us. a lovely open brief too - just come up with some ideas for how the borough’s informative signage could be made more fun. the probem is that most public signs have become almost invisible within today’s highly visual culture so if you still want to get a message across a different approach is needed. several previous attempts at this could be seen around the borough, all of which seemed to use badly drawn pint glasses. at best this is rather inappropriate as how many people do you see wandering around town with pints in their hands? (unless, of course, those signs were actually doing a very good job at preventing that…)

in some ways i’m a little saddened that clear, simple signs like the ‘ball games’ one above no longer do the job. maybe they’re over familiar. this particular one is set in ‘transport‘ - the typeface developed by jock kinneir and margaret calvert for the department of transport in the 50/60s. that’s the typeface you see on all the motorway signs, although sadly it’s often used in a rather poor way these days.

so, with a brief to come up with something more visual that just words and yet driven by a personal desire to let typography alone do the job we developed a series of characters out of letter shapes. the original incarnation of the slightly worse for wear fella you can see above was constructed purely from the ubiquitous ‘arial’ font (we’d have used ‘transport’ if we’d had a copy). since then he’s had a couple of tweaks, but much of the artwork is still pure fonts. there’s also a pooing dog and a vicious seagull in the same style so it’ll be fun to see if they eventually pop up all over the place like this guy has. the wording for the alcohol signs had to be phrased according to the law, but on the other ideas we also had some fun with the words to try and make people smile whilst they’re scooping up their doggy mess.

my son dylan points them out whenever he sees one - “look dad, it’s that funny man you drew” - so it’s at least catching the attention of the pre-school age group. although how anti-social you can be with a non-spill cup of milk, i’m not sure. we didn’t know it at the time, but these are the first of their kind in britain and our local mp robert goodwill has recommended to parliament that our ‘funky’ (his words) design be adopted nationwide.