Sign UP! Sheet: Dry Clean Windows

By Mark Kaufman
I love hand painted signs. Roadside signs, side of the building signs, retail window signs, I love them all, they are meant to inform and to decorate and serve as a differentiator to the competing business down the street, regardless of artistic or spelling capabilities. I saw these in a local dry cleaner window. For some reason part of the visual langauge of the dry cleaning business  happens to be crude hand painted window signs. So I thought I would stop and snap a couple of shots of these. Upon closer inspection these are not hand done, they are in fact stock window decals made to look like they were done by an untrained hand. Does it infer a homey feeling, a small family run business, a patron of outsider art? I don’t know, but it is curious that the dry cleaning business maintains these visual cues for it’s patrons and the world at large.