I don't usually intentionally take ugly photos, let alone post them, but this one bugs me. And I'm gonna tell you why.
This is a simple sign, designed to convey a limited amount of information: the company and individual selling the property, their contact information, and its market status.
The main body of the sign - the white text on light blue - is in Adobe's Myriad, and if it looks familiar, it should: it's also the font used by Wal-Mart, Apple, WestJet, and the header of this blog. It's a very popular font, modern but with humanist tones, and it's often used by big companies who want to seem laid-back and hip. (Frutiger, which is used by CIBC, is very similar but slightly pointier.)
The rest of the main sign is a bit of a stumper for me; it looks most like Hoefler Text but with lining instead of ranging figures. Even without a precise identification, it's a classic typeface, very much from the Garamond/Jannon family, drawing its inspiration from Western Europe c.1500. For what it's worth, Hoefler Text is a fantastic typeface, and it's what I used back when I was marketing toward real estate agents. But it's a bad combination with Myriad.
And then it really falls apart into the abyss of Windows/Word 'design'. They may have been trying to match the look of the "for sale" text with the add-on "sold" sign, but they hit Times New Roman (Bold) and then stopped trying. Look at the serifs on the S and shape of the O, and it's a clear miss; this is a typeface designed for legibility in newspapers. The salesperson's name is in Arial Black, which has the single redeeming virtue of not being as offensive as Arial, which is what his job title and phone number is set in. Arial is a shameless derivative of Helvetica, which is mid-century modern, and its sole reason for existence is to let Microsoft be compatible with the then-dominant Apple's desktop publishing market without the burden of paying licensing fees.
While I realize that every step toward professional marketing comes directly out of an agent's take-home pay, why would I trust a company/individual that can't create a professional and consistent image for themselves to be able to sell something worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?
2 comments:
Is that area code supposed to be 4I6 instead of 416?
The 1/I character is why I think that someone paid extra for the lining figures with Hoefler Text - it's one of the distinctive parts of that typeface, and I doubt it was just a typo. But I suppose anything is possible...
Now, our postal codes are another matter - they follow the format A1B 2C3, which are difficult to remember and annoying to type.
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