@ardgedee Totally possible, but I've been trying to think through the honest fuckup workflow too because that's more interesting to me.
Like, the fact that it's an o/O and a/A swap but nothing else is monkeyed with, nothing out of order, no obvious joke -- feels like it could be someone assigning the materials slot by slot and just not being careful enough about the fact that it was a mix of case.
But then, which part of the process is human mediated and which part is essentially mechanical, and how does that lettering distribution fuckup play into that? Is the sign measured out from scratch by a human draftsperson, laid out by hand just so? Or is the layout done by some mechanical or computer process and the letter forms fed into a hopper or positions as a separate process? Etc.
Basically I want to watch a How It's Made video now, I guess.
It took me a while before I saw the lettering on the second line. I just find it very hard to imagine that it's all done by hand, that someone is handed a set of physical letters and told to put them in order.
I'm imagining something like: layout done on computer. Layout generates a bunch of specified positions for relevant physical letter forms, distributed by a human. Human sticks the right letters in the right spots (or the right feeders, or a hopper in the right order). Sign gets crafted.
And so something like the failure to double check that the right o and the right a were in the right hopper/order/stack/position lets the fuckup happen without requiring it to be the result of an entirely manual process. (In fact it feels like a mix of human and mechanical processes, where human eyeballs don't end up on the project for the entire workflow, would make it easier to fuck this up than if it were laid out start to finish by a human craftsman who would go "wait, that's obviously not right" while laying letters down, etc.
@jessamyn One would have been Russ' Dinor, since it's on rt. 20 in Wesleyville, PA (and the family that owns it have been neighbors with my folks for decades)
https://goo.gl/maps...
As for "dinor" rather than "diner": I remember looking into that once. Seems to be a regionalism distinct to the Lake Erie coast of Pennsylvania and the westernmost bit of New York, but nowhere else.
@joshmillard @Kevin Old-fashioned way of doing it was to lay out the letters in black (where they might literally be cut out pieces of board arranged on a pencil rule) on a flatbed camera, stat a transparency, use that to burn a silkscreen stencil. Then they can print using that high-reflectivity ink.
Dunno how it's done now, been a long time since I was in the printing business.
@jessamyn yeah, sadly not much else to recommend in the area other than for being this weird little chunk of America where the fast food corporations haven't forced the local blue collar restos to go upscale and and try to leverage their retro appeal to draw more affluent customers in order to get by.
@jessamyn If I'd known earlier that you were roadtripping straight through my hometown I would've pointed some dinors at you.
Like, the fact that it's an o/O and a/A swap but nothing else is monkeyed with, nothing out of order, no obvious joke -- feels like it could be someone assigning the materials slot by slot and just not being careful enough about the fact that it was a mix of case.
But then, which part of the process is human mediated and which part is essentially mechanical, and how does that lettering distribution fuckup play into that? Is the sign measured out from scratch by a human draftsperson, laid out by hand just so? Or is the layout done by some mechanical or computer process and the letter forms fed into a hopper or positions as a separate process? Etc.
Basically I want to watch a How It's Made video now, I guess.
And so something like the failure to double check that the right o and the right a were in the right hopper/order/stack/position lets the fuckup happen without requiring it to be the result of an entirely manual process. (In fact it feels like a mix of human and mechanical processes, where human eyeballs don't end up on the project for the entire workflow, would make it easier to fuck this up than if it were laid out start to finish by a human craftsman who would go "wait, that's obviously not right" while laying letters down, etc.
http://www.signcad.com/index...
http://www.transoftsolutions2015.com/guidsign
Both can dump to sign cutters, but I'm not sure how that part works. It could be individual letters are cut and laid out on the sign.
https://goo.gl/maps...
Another would have been Zodiac Dinor, not on Rt. 20, but within eyeshot as you drove past:
https://goo.gl/maps...
https://mltshp.com/p/159J0
https://mltshp.com/p/159IZ
https://mltshp.com/p/159IX
Up the street from the Zodiac and also within eyeshot, not a dinor in name but of an era: George's Restaurant
https://mltshp.com/p/15UOZ
I never ate at Georges, last I heard it'd closed, but I hope not, I want to try their mashed potatoes.
As for "dinor" rather than "diner": I remember looking into that once. Seems to be a regionalism distinct to the Lake Erie coast of Pennsylvania and the westernmost bit of New York, but nowhere else.
Dunno how it's done now, been a long time since I was in the printing business.