African Barbershop Sign vs Ghost Signs
アフリカの理髪店看板 / ゴーストサイン
Both sit in Signage and Display, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
African Barbershop Sign
The hand-painted signboards of West African barbershops: numbered haircut samples in a grid, flat repeated faces sitting between product catalogue and portraiture.
Ghost Signs
Hand-painted brick-wall advertisements faded by weather. The lettering of the craftsmen called wall dogs, through peeling and fading, is being rediscovered as a stratum of urban memory.
| African Barbershop Sign | Ghost Signs | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1950s– | 1880s–1950s / rediscovery |
| Family | Signage and Display | Signage and Display |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Grids of haircut samples / Flat repeated faces / Numbers and hand lettering / Enamel on plywood | Paint applied straight to brick / Fading and peeling / Craftsman lettering / Layers of overpainting |
| Best used for | Showing the choices in pictures for customers who cannot read the text · Shopfront signage hand painted to survive sun and rain | Treating the traces on an existing wall as design in a renovation · Painting a new sign on an old building with the texture of accumulated time |
| Type | Number each cut and paint only the shop name large by hand | Redraw period shop lettering by hand, with shadowed letters and ornament rules |
| Composition | Grid of equal frames with every face drawn at the same angle | Do not dodge joints or openings, aligning letters to the brick coursing |
| Material | Enamel on plywood, few colors, black outlines holding it together | Brushed straight onto brick, assuming the least stable colors fade first |
| Caution | Individualizing the faces as portraits breaks the catalogue function, and customers can no longer use the board to order. | Applying an even wash of distress falsifies the direction of fading and the order of overpainting, and the intended age reads as fake. |