Ghost Signs vs Neon Signage
ゴーストサイン / ネオンサイン
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.
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.
Neon Signage
The commercial sign style of bent glass tubes glowing as letters and pictures. Hong Kong's street-spanning character signs and Las Vegas's escalating light wars built each city's nighttime visual language.
| Ghost Signs | Neon Signage | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1880s–1950s / rediscovery | 1912–1990s / revival |
| Family | Signage and Display | Signage and Display |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Paint applied straight to brick / Fading and peeling / Craftsman lettering / Layers of overpainting | Lines of bent glass tube / Glowing letters on the night sky / Signs projecting over the road / Blinking and chasing motion |
| Best used for | 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 | Making a sign that announces a shop's position from far down a night street · Staging the excitement of an entertainment district in colored light and motion |
| Type | Redraw period shop lettering by hand, with shadowed letters and ornament rules | Letterforms drawn in one continuous tube, complex characters kept from thickening |
| Composition | Do not dodge joints or openings, aligning letters to the brick coursing | Project over the sidewalk, deciding the upward viewing angles first |
| Material | Brushed straight onto brick, assuming the least stable colors fade first | Gas and coating chosen per color, blinking chased in one direction |
| Caution | Applying an even wash of distress falsifies the direction of fading and the order of overpainting, and the intended age reads as fake. | Substituting neon look LED tape loses the depth and bloom of glass tube, and the imitation gives itself away the moment you stand close. |