"...left to the mercy of sunshine, soot, and shower"

This proclamation is about the poster movement in London in the 1890's but I think it's completely comparable to the PVS movement of the 2010's.

"Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash.
The popular idea of a picture is something told in oil or writ in water to be hung on a room’s wall or in a picture gallery to perplex an artless public. No one expects it to serve a useful purpose or take a part in everyday existence. Our modern painter has merely to give a picture a good name and hang it.
Now the poster first of all justified its existence on the grounds of utility, and should it further aspire to beauty of line and colour, may not our hoardings claim kinship with the galleries, and the designers of affiches pose proudly in the public eye...?
Still there is a general feeling that the artist who puts his art into the poster is déclassé—on the streets—and consequently of light character. The critics can discover no brush work to prate of, the painter looks askance upon a thing that achieves publicity without a frame, and beauty without modelling, and the public find it hard to take seriously a poor printed thing left to the mercy of sunshine, soot, and shower, like any old fresco over an Italian church door..." -Aubrey Beardsley, 1894

The Pre-Vinylites: Notes on a Manifesto

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of young, London artists in the mid 1800's who were tired of the proliferation of art made by imitation and repetition and void of emotional connection. They established a fellowship and detailed their ambitions in a manifesto which included such intentions as:

• to have genuine ideas to express;
• to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
• to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote;
• and, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues

They referred to themselves as "Pre-Raphaelites" because they believed that the tradition that resulted from the imitation of Raphael's classical model was a corruption to art, making it devoid it of emotion and humanity.

Our intention for a "Pre-Vinylite Society" proposes to subvert the recent convention of tasteless signage as a digression from both time honored design and the traditional hand painted signs. We believe that sign craft, if done with care and passion, can aestheticize our urban landscape. This ideal is not limited to the execution of hand painted signs alone, what ever the medium, if done with care, tact, and well executed design, can positively affect the surrounding landscape. These are just some preliminary thoughts on what we hope will become, itself, a manifesto. Please comment with any ideas that you may have about the resurgence of hand painted signs and let's make this "society" a reality!

-PVS

Moving Along

The Chameleon sign is completed and installed and receiving rave reviews! Josh is now working on a sandwich board for Good Faith Tattoo. He finished their glass door last week. Here's what it looks like:

If you want to see more photos of the sign-making and installation process , check out Best Dressed Signs' Facebook page!

Next up is a sign for Primitive Traditions Body Piercing (in the same building as Good Faith) and then hopefully some signs for Dame, a really cool vintage store in Jamaica Plain, if they accept the bid. So far, so good.

A Rant by Meredith and then some Hot Italian Beef!

Tomorrow is the big day! Best Dressed Signs is installing our first sign in Boston! The installation is scheduled to start at 9:00am and Josh is putting the finishing touches on the sign at this moment!

And now, what I think are some important implications:

I think it's imperative that signage, as the most basic form of marketing, should not only be conducive to generating business for the company that it advertises, but should also contribute to the beautification of a space. It is, after all, or should be, the most accessible art that we see every day. Boston spent billions of dollars on the Big Dig in an effort to (among other things, of course) beautify the city, with the expansion of parks and greenways. Why not extend that aesthetic progress to the the city's signs? I think this Chameleon sign is going to be the first step towards changing the way people think about their urban environment here in Boston. I hope so, anyway.

Okay, enough of that. Click on this video to see Josh in action, working on the last sign that he painted for New Bohemia in San Francisco. And check in again on Sunday, when I'll be posting all about our adventures in installation. It will certainly be the first time I've ever done it. Wish us luck!

Work in Progress. Still.

The Chameleon signs are in the works! I forgot that they're getting two signs and they're HUGE so it's taking a little longer than first anticipated (besides the fact that Josh obsessed over the precise geometry of the 3-D and tacked strings to the wall, making me angle them just so while he stood across the room contemplating with his hand on his beard). But they're coming out awesome and will be worth the wait!

He also just finished a sign for the 90th anniversary of a New York company called WWD, a fashion news website. The woman had originally contacted New Bohemia and they referred her to Best Dressed Signs since we're on the east coast. Thanks New Bo!

Here's the sign for them:

Next up: Good Faith Tattoo on Comm Ave near BU. They're getting their glass door and some sandwich boards done. We'll keep you posted.

And GO GIANTS!!!

Gettin' Goin'

This is the finalized sketch for Chameleon Tattoo. We've been given the go-ahead and Josh has started on the pattern. Here's a picture of him tracing the projected pattern:

Today he reserved another ZipCar and picked up the wood which the physical sign will be painted on. Tomorrow will begin "Covert Mission #1: rolling out the background paint in the basement". We'll see how it goes. Apparently, my cousin has offered to share part of his studio space so if things don't work out here, Josh at least has another option.

At this very moment, Josh is working on some sketches for Good Faith Tattoo. He is scheduled to start their window on Monday the 25th. After that, he'll start on some sandwich boards for them.

The Chameleon sign is scheduled to be installed by the end of next week and we'll be sure to post some pictures of the final product (including also, most likely, some more shots of Josh in mid-painting action). Stay tuned! This is just the beginning for Best Dressed Signs!

Open for Business!

This is the first sketch for Chameleon Tattoo and Body Piercing in the Garage in Harvard Sq. Josh submitted it to them and they LOVED it! It's obviously not finished, he's gonna tweak it a little bit, make it curve the other way so that "Tattoo" is to the left of "Body Piercing" but the idea is pretty much a go!
We're getting going on the equipment side of things. The Electro Pounce (a device that perforates the pattern so that a chalk outline can be traced onto the surface of the sign) arrived at our door today. We signed up for ZipCar so Josh can go and run errands like picking up the wood and paint and whatnot. He needs a saw and sawhorses that fold so that he can covertly sneak them into the basement of our apartment building to cut wood and roll out background paint. I think it'll go unnoticed, for a while at least.

The next step is advertising. The business card is finished and at the printers. Here's a preview (the real one has a phone number too):

The Website will be coming soon so keep an eye out! We'll update you here when it's up and running. Or at least up. Thanks for reading! And thanks for being Facebook fans, we're reaching 100!