I’ve seen these signs a few times and today got a chance to experience them up close. They aren’t far from my house, in the South East corner of San Francisco. Very cool. I think Sacha liked them as much as I did (probably for different reasons).
I wonder when they were put in?
How did they get the mold so accurate to the typeface?
Hello, Im a Design student and found very interesting this concrete sign. I was wondering If you could give me some information about it, at least to know where you found it (what is this building behind?). Thanks!
The sign is at the India Basin Industrial park in the South-East corner of San Francisco.
I’m not sure how they would make these accurately out of concrete, but I could have made smaller plastic prototypes of them at my last job. A 3D model could be created easily — most CAD packages let you use system fonts as sketches, which you can then extrude into 3D. Once you have 3D models, you can get to prototypes in almost any material in just a few steps.
The molds for the front and back of these could have been laser or CNC cut wood. Making the side-walls probably wouldn’t have been that different from the way they fabricate acoustic guitar sides.
Anyhow, pretty darn neat, especially in their simplicity and elegance.