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Homemade Signage


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Ok @Madsing here you go! 
 

this topic is for folks to share their home made sinage for buildings, stations, etc. please only post your own work and don’t post any of the premade signs by manufacturers.

 

cheers

 

jeff

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Ultra-basic provisional sign I made for Takahachikawa Station a while back (so it didn't end up as "Shin Yamanote Station"):

 

51835054683_f828ea372a_z.jpg

takahachikawa-station-sign-2022-01-22_01 by Rail Squid, on Flickr

 

I didn't add the English name for some reason.

 

The cunning plan (actually Cunning Plan ca. Nr. 922) is to create different styles (JR East, JNR era etc.) and attach them (via magnets?) so I can "re-era" the station at will...

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I've been working on signs for actual businesses, starting with Mito.  Folks are welcome to use these if you like.
 
First up is the O-Hara Academy.  This is a chain of corporate business schools, their Mito campus is the medical and dental office training one.  They also use OBS in their coat of arms, presumably for O-Hara Business School, they seem a little wibbly-wobbly on branding.

 

OharaSignRomanji.jpg

 

OharaSignKanji.jpg

 

O-HaraArmsSzd7_16.jpg

Edited by Cat
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The Eddy Family Fuji Festival handles funerals, weddings, and doll ceremonies.  The large blue signs are the box billboard atop the building (one of the few such in Mito).  They also have a sign near the top of their building with directions to Ceremonia, another Eddy Family location in Mito; and just below that a big sign with directions to Felivert, another wedding and party business.
 
For white signs, I put them inside a black frame so I can see where to cut out after printing them.
 

23_54 Eddy Framed.jpg

 

Eddy Blue Frame.jpg

 

52_23 LtBlueFujiSaiten.jpg

 

33_23 LtBlueBillboardEnd.jpg

 

45_3 CeremoniaDir.jpg

 

23_23 FelivertSign.jpg

Edited by Cat
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The ground floor of the Fuji Festival building is also home to the Toa Bussan trucking company's Mito Sales Office and has some signage down at street level.
 

23_7 TBMitoSales Framed.jpg

 

23_7 TBLogo Framed.jpg

Edited by Cat
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The Wakashiko Tea Shop has a traditional signboard, and I made a seasonal banner and poster advertising Winter/Autumn Tea.

 

WakashikoSign_20_5 Szd.jpg

 

23_8 AkifuyubanchaPoster Framed.jpg

 

AkifuyuBannerFront 23_4 Framed.jpg

Edited by Cat
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Our model of the Sakura Dental Clinic is in the works.  It was a fun one to choose because it is a small dental office raised up on stilts for parking underneath.  The black line on the pair for their curbside signpost is a 'cut here' line, the post comes up under the sign and angles around to one side.

 

23_54 Sakura Black Framed.jpg

 

23_29 Sakura Signboard Pairs.jpg

Edited by Cat
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  • cteno4 changed the title to Homemade Signage
29 minutes ago, cteno4 said:

(Don’t listen to the printer running in the background!)


Print away, I'll make more!
: 3
 
Next in line at the sign shop are for a trio of small restaurants near Mito Station.

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Great thread! Are these all (or mostly) signs y'all have designed and created yourselves? Or images that you have captured and reprinted? If it's the former can some of you write a few lines about how you did it?

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56 minutes ago, gavino200 said:

Great thread! Are these all (or mostly) signs y'all have designed and created yourselves? Or images that you have captured and reprinted? If it's the former can some of you write a few lines about how you did it?

Mine are images I have mined off the internet.  The banners are from various sign shops.  The ramen posters are off websites, but these are similar to shop window  banners and sandwich board signs. I collected lots of Hiroshima area signs while waiting for my first Kato Greenmover LEX tram.

Edited by bill937ca
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4 hours ago, gavino200 said:

Great thread! Are these all (or mostly) signs y'all have designed and created yourselves? Or images that you have captured and reprinted? If it's the former can some of you write a few lines about how you did it?

 

A few of mine are simply mined and sized. as needed.  The Wakashiki signboard came from a nearly flat-on photo image, and then with a combination of cropping and with proportional change turned off I could resize to get the proportions I wanted and the kanji weren't distorted out of legibility in the process.

 

A lot of them are done up from scratch.  Ages ago I was pretty fluent in Adobe Illustrator, but haven't had a recent version of that in quite awhile, and they kept making changes anyway, so all my learned skills became obsolete, grr.  These days, I get a lot of mileage out of just using Preview on my Mac; and popping things into LunaPic, a free website, as needed for fancier editing.

The O-Hara romanji logo I captured from their website, brought it into Lunapic to make the background transparent and colour the letters, then back to Preview to paste onto my sized background strip.

All the Japanese lettering takes a fair amount of sleuthing; I am not fluent.  Once I correctly identify the company (which can take a bit of work) and then find their website (often requires searching in Japanese, although 'Felivert' struck gold on the first hit!), then with a bit of hunting I can usually find the text somewhere on their page that matches the text on the signs.  Sometimes though, I have to hunt and peck to find all the different kanji, copying and pasting one at a time.

I copy and paste the text into Google Translate to double check what all it says.  When I like the text string, I copy that and paste it into a text box in Preview and just adjust font size and colouring there.  I also copy and paste it into a reference file so I keep it on hand in a text format too.

 

I couldn't find a good image of the interlocking circles logo for the Fuji Festival billboard, that doesn't appear anywhere on the website.  Fortunately it was a simple enough geometric pattern to create with the 'add circles' function in Preview.

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Major tools for me are Google translate, Google Streets and Google images.  When i see an image on a building I try to look up the building particularly if it is near a train station or other landmark that may be used to pinpoint an address.  In the past I mainly stuck to generic images like Ramen signs. 

 

Many of the signs I found on buildings in Hiroshima were corporate logos. Some are cell phone corporations, some loan businesses bordering on loan sharks, and the good old Nova cram schools.  But I think you could use any anime or magna image that can be resized.

 

Sometimes if an image is properly lined up in Google Streets (hard) or perhaps on Flickr, I will cut the sign out with photo processing software like IfanView. IfanView is also where I crop images. I can resize images in Word by right clicking on the image and clicking on Size and Position.  

 

To make an image for a building I print on cardstock (like for business cards). Sizing is trail and error. Many of my signs have fitted storefront windows.

Edited by bill937ca
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