Your GO-TO sign painter – Old school know-how with today's technology – since 1981.
Since 1981 – I’ve been a sign painter and graphic artist creating hand painted graphics, custom signs, and school murals, school awards and more in San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles and throughout Southern California.
Big City Signs | Graphics is moving into a fresh, new, informative, modern, and pretty nice looking website. Please come on over and take a look!
Last thing I did before leaving the job was a panorama video of the gym. A lot of hand-painted work (also some contour cut digital print, and vinyl lettering), finished!
From summer 2016
The point of marketing is to brand a business, location, or organization and bring in customers and increase sales.
Here are some samples of locations that turned their entire buildings (or a good sized part of them) into eye-catching brand builders.
The Golden Road Brewing location in Anaheim CA got an entire new look with the hand painted graphics scheme Big City painted at the end of 2017.
Love it or not, you probably can’t say you don’t remember it after seeing it. See what I mean about eye-catching brand builders?
Earlier this year, the Big City team painted eye-catching branding graphics onto the Alton Marketplace center in Irvine CA. Again, you can’t miss this place. Here are some photos:
This little animal adoption organization in Los Angeles CA wanted to use their entire building as a canvas… Big City got the job done.
Over at UC Irvine, Big City was asked to paint a 100 ft tall water tower in the middle of the campus with mascot Peter the Anteater and the UCI logo. That UCI logo ended up as background for photos taken in 2017 when the LA Rams used their facility for practice.
Our client was nice enough to do a time lapse of the work on Peter the Anteater:
Here is some great school branding – Claremont High School’s gym in Claremont CA got the Big City supergraphics treatment:
We transformed this shed into a school-pride-oriented building at Gabrielino High School in San Gabriel CA:
One more in the school category – Big City painted this supersized hawk, the school mascot for Hutchinson Middle School in La Mirada CA.
You might be thinking about getting this kind of project done, Do you know where to start? I can tell you – contact me, Paul Borne (president of Big City Signs) to find out more.
Back before computers were everywhere, I worked with some businesses to develop a graphic identity for their vehicles, printing, etc. I may have saved the logo design graphics somewhere, if I find them I’ll add photos to this post. Bouncy scripts incorporated into graphics have a unique eye-catching flow to them.
This one – Bay View Plumbing in Redondo Beach CA, was a classic sign painter design that ended up in all their printed pieces, on the vans, magnetic signs, the awning over the office, and who knows where else!
Another plumbing business I designed lettering for – I believe this was the first of a series of plumbing businesses because of referrals – is this one in Torrance CA.
This logo has been used by Discount Pool & Spa Supply in Lomita CA for many years. This was the first van I did for them…
Fortunately we decided to lose the goofy pool water I thought was so clever in later years — still doing their vehicles, but now wrapping them (still using the same logo) like this:
Here’s another plumbing van client that I started working with in that time period, this one in Torrance CA. This is a newer vehicle, done in vinyl – but the bouncy script layout was inspired by years of sign painting.
This window signage for Robin Smith Physical Therapy in Manhattan Beach CA used the client’s business identity that included a script-style combined with classic sign painting techniques.
Based on her business card which had the color effect in the name lettering. Hand painted inside glass – started with outlines and descriptive copy (under the name), then stippled color in the name, and stippled white for the translucent effect it provides for the panel. I did this somewhere in the early 1990’s.
Finally, here is one more bouncy, hand painted, sign painter design style (kind of a showcard in banner format) I did around, maybe, 1985…
Sign painters have had a huge influence on graphic design in times past. We can look to all the unique script hand-lettering in (what I think, anyway) was the heyday of advertising and graphic design in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Hope you enjoyed this post.
Uploaded some photos of some back-in-the-day sign painting and other work I did in the 1980’s and 90’s, so I thought I’d collect them in one album, here (click the photo to view):
#signpainting #signpainter #handpainted (mostly)
