Circus Poster vs Ghost Signs
サーカスポスター / ゴーストサイン
Circus Poster comes from Advertising Posters and Ghost Signs from Signage and Display. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Circus Poster
Show bills that mustered chromolithography and wood type to announce the spectacle in overloaded scenes and the largest words available. Pasted up until they occupied whole walls, they were advertising that turned the city into a theater.
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.
| Circus Poster | Ghost Signs | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1870s–1930s | 1880s–1950s / rediscovery |
| Family | Advertising Posters | Signage and Display |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Saturated chromolithography / Exaggerated animals and acrobats / Superlative slogans / Dense composition | Paint applied straight to brick / Fading and peeling / Craftsman lettering / Layers of overpainting |
| Best used for | Posting a festival or show bill with enough force to pull a crowd · Packing many acts onto one sheet so the abundance itself sells | 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 | Wood type headlines changing face line by line, set tight without spacing | Redraw period shop lettering by hand, with shadowed letters and ornament rules |
| Composition | Slogans top and bottom, scenes of the acts packed solid between | Do not dodge joints or openings, aligning letters to the brick coursing |
| Material | Saturated lithographic color led by red and yellow, sized for repeated posting | Brushed straight onto brick, assuming the least stable colors fade first |
| Caution | Chasing density without building a hierarchy buries the date and place, and the sheet becomes something people look at and then forget. | Applying an even wash of distress falsifies the direction of fading and the order of overpainting, and the intended age reads as fake. |