The Pleasure of Sign Hunting

We're on the road in Wisconsin this week, so it's an opportunity to see a bunch of new signs... which, to me, is almost as exciting as a beautiful vista would be to a more normal person.

In honor of this road trip, I'm starting a new category called Drive-by Shooting for the casual, roadside photos I tend to shoot when I'm in the car. (I've gone back to some of my past Out and About posts and recategorized them as Drive-by Shooting when appropriate.)


We were checking out the downtown of a smallish town called Stanley, a bit east of Eau Claire, when I happened upon this sign on the roof of a chiropractor's office. As a fan of both restroom door figures and diaper changing signs, I thought these refugees from the Men's and Women's Room were a funny bit of generica.

Then I saw the other sign for the same business, hanging under the eaves, just in front of the door.


???!!!! Somewhere between the first sign and the second, the generic mom had a baby! (Or maybe she bought a loaf of bread.) Is this what happens when you go to the chiropractor?


I really had no intention of singling out chiropractors, but a bit farther down the road in Steven's Point I had to stop the car again to get a picture of this sign.

The figures probably would have been enough to merit a drive-by shot -- the funky body shapes, combined with the threatening, huge sun shining like a red rubber ball just over the dad's head and the weird truncated shadows -- but when you add in the business name, I can't help but conclude this may be the funniest sign I have ever seen. (Perhaps the owners were inspired by Roald Dahl.)


Literally half a block from the Twits sign was this bank. Only in northern Wisconsin (at least, I hope it's only in northern Wisconsin) will you see a bank in a log cabin. Not one of us realized it was a bank.

I wonder if they have trouble attracting business... or if, possibly, half their customers started out by asking whether they had any vacancies for the night.


Beyond the architectural camouflage, I couldn't helping noticing the bank's painfully bad logo. Part of its problem is that it doesn't communicate the idea of "bank," but its execution is faulty for more reasons than that:

• It uses a really dated typeface (Clearface, popular in the late '70s)
• The type has been condensed beyond its original proportion, which is always somewhat awkward
  
• The capital P has been turned into an gawky giraffe that interacts with the word "the" too much (my daughter immediately read it off as "P the")
  
• The redundant use of a pine tree as the letter "i". (The designer must have missed the lesson where the teacher explained that it's naive for the picture to exactly mirror the words; it's more effective for the two to interact and let the viewer make closure.)
  
• The eagle over the pine tree... it feels like pandering to the assumed audience in a way that annoys me. There's just something about a log cabin bank, nestled in a bunch of strip malls that used to be forests or farm fields, exploiting a picture of an eagle to appeal to people who have built cabins and houses in areas that used to be woods and farm fields that doesn't sit right with me.

But I really do love Wisconsin. More later.