Eye Spy... a Sign

Jenaveve at August Street is hosting this week’s Eye Spy Sunday and I’m taking the literal approach to the ‘sign’ theme. I'm partial to a nice bit of wayfinding in general but have always loved Alan Fletcher’s front gate in particular. The late, great, English master of design, based his gate alphabet on an old condensed wooden typeface. The letters are held together by the hinge straps. The ‘tail’ of the ‘Q’ ingeniously acts as the gate-stop. Faces huddled into winter woollies, speedy-walker types or those who expect only plain vertical iron bits on the fronts of houses could easily miss the gate-joy.

For five cumulative years I worked in the vicinity of Alan Fletcher’s home and studio in London and passed these same gates to and from the tube station. Count that up and that’s three thousand, six hundred and fifty gate passings (give and take a holiday here and weekend work there). You can directly translate that into roughly three thousand, six hundred and fifty on the inside (and, not infrequently on the outside) Tania grins.

Find more Eye Spyers over at Bug and Pop. Image from ‘Pentagram: The Compendium’