I covet the Lettres Decoratives portfolios that were so easy to find decades ago in the great Parisian flea markets, where I scarfed up many of their oversized pages—and Letterform Archive is now publishing high-quality reproductions of them in one book. The pages in Lettres Decoratives were “free source” type templates of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, although the Victorian and Nouveau styles continue to be relevant today.
“By the 1990s, vinyl letters had submerged the sign market,” writes Morgane Côme in her detailed historical introduction, “and opportunities to train in traditional methods and connect with professional painters became scarce.” These illuminated letterforms would be gone, if not forgotten, but for the contemporary designer-typographer for whom these rarities are inspiring not just for the ingenious forms of the alphabets but the unconventional color combinations.
Many of these examples were models for painted signs on wood, metal and glass. On the pages included in this rich volume they look veritably illuminated. France was a wellspring for letters such as these; they defined the commercial style of the nation with the same bravado and variety as its architecture. Sign painters feasted on common variants of finely serifed Didones and bifurcated boule (rounded serifed) ball letters. These portfolios established a baseline for alphabets that became popular (and populist) all over France, especially in Paris, where display types filled up the landscape with typographic cacophonies.
Whether Lettres Decoratives revives the “painted alphabet” for the digital age, it is too early to tell. But resurrecting these impressive documents provides an invaluable resource for any typographer who is considering returning to the decorative magic of the past.
The post The Daily Heller: Painted Letters for Parisian Sign Writers appeared first on PRINT Magazine.