mood board – the wild west.
here is the second mood board in my thematic archetype series—the wild west (click the image to enlarge). i’m finding that as i do these, some conventions are taking shape. the ‘roofline’ approach—here with a wooden shed, before with a thatch hut for tropical paradise—really serves to frame each piece as an architectural exploration. also, when all seven of them are completed and displayed together, there will be some visual unity. for this board i drew primarily on disney’s frontierland vision, knott’s berry farm (buena park, CA), ghost town attractions of the southwest, dollywood (pigeon forge, TN), restaurant chains such as the claim jumper, and various las vegas casinos, some long since demolished—the frontier, the westerner, el rancho, the silver slipper, the pioneer club, et al. besides the main shed roofline at the top, i built in some smaller roof elements—spanish tile and steel shed—to showcase the diversity of the western image.
in discussing the mood board yesterday with my thesis advisor, we hit upon an interesting observation. more so perhaps than any other archetype, the visual cues for the wild west are often typographically driven. there is a plethora of signage on this board, owning to the fact that nearly every example i found was replete with mimicked wood typography from the late 19th century. i became fascinated with this style of lettering when i produced a research book on the topic for a typography class in my first year of grad school. what grabbed me is that wood type seems to have left an indelible mark on american culture, far beyond the reaches of just a design audience. although the layman would be hard-pressed to identify the distinctions between a transitional and a humanist typeface, you can grab nearly anybody and point to a slab-serif or extended bold clarendon and get “old west” immediately.
in any case, to theme the ‘old west’ properly requires wood type, and a whole lot of it.
March 8th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Why do you think that font style is so closely tied with identifying an Old West Theme?
March 8th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
i think most typefaces are versatile enough that they enjoy a long life, and undergo many phases of use. the typography to come out of the late 1800s was rather loud, horsey and obnoxious. as a result, most of these faces passed quickly out of fashion as the twentieth century got moving, and have never seen a genuine revival. 19th century wood type is only used properly in graphics to reference the time period in which the fonts originated, that having been their only legitimate use.
using garamond, say, doesn’t visually lock me into the era in which it was created because garamond has been used over and over again, in different movements and contexts, for over 200 years. the same cannot be said for nearly all wood typography. so, if these fonts are only used to represent the ‘old west’ period, pretty soon the viewing public comes to regard them AS old west.
in theming, the most obvious and widely-acknowledged symbols are often the most powerful (and thus employed the most frequently). using wood typography is a great ’shortcut’ to representing the old west, given its exposure to the masses as such a symbol.