The Sign Painter

“I need to hire 2 painters. Must be willing to do hard, tedious work outside. Wusses need not apply. Must have an understanding of typeface and be able to prove it. Must also have experience with painting, preferably house painting vs artsy farsty painting. No Picassos needed.”

I stopped scrolling when I saw the post.

It was a screenshot from the old iPhone notes app — the yellow notepad. You know the one. The Skeuomorphic one. Before Apple made everything flat.

This was my first interaction with The Sign Painter.

The bluntness of the post had made me laugh, as did his method of posting it. You could tell this guy didn't put up with bullshit and didn't suffer fools.

I ran through his requirements in my head.

I considered myself a hard worker.
I had recently dropped out of art school.
And most pressingly...I needed money.

I made my mind up then and there that I was going to get this job.

What I did not realize at the time, a week after dropping out of art school, this Sign Painter would give me a crash course in design, the value of hard work, and an invaluable lesson on how to survive in the city.

On Sign Painting

Sign painting sits in this strange intersection between blue-collar grit and fine art precision.

It is functional, but also poetic.
It is outlaw, but has a deep respect for tradition.

Sign Painters are not stuck behind a computer screen all day. They work with their hands. They practice their craft in hard to reach places, on street corners, and outside your favorite restaurant.

The first Sign Painters were nomadic, traveling from town to town getting work where they could. They operated under the beating sun, and made their livelihood one brush stroke at a time.

This experience was no different.

First Meetings

I met The Sign Painter on a job site the following week.

I turned another corner and found him at the back of the building perched atop a loose tower of construction scaffolding with white earbuds dangling down into his pocket.

He shouted over his music, "I'm coming down now, one second!"

He put aside the brush he was holding and shimmied down the scaffolding with ease. He walked toward me extending his hand with a wide smile, his singular gold tooth immediately catching my eye.

The sun was beating down on us. The Atlanta summers didn’t suffer fools.

"Thanks for coming by, I know it's pretty hot out but just wanted to give you a look at the setup and get an idea for what type of work we'll be getting into this summer." he said.

He looked over his shoulder toward the back entrance to the kitchen and whispered under his breath,

“Heads up, we’ll be working weird hours to avoid the city inspectors. I'm pretty sure he doesn't have a permit”

I nodded.

“If they catch me in the act I'm sure they'll hit him with a fine. If you see anyone that looks remotely official just drop the brush immediately...they can only slap you with a fine if they catch you in the act."

As I watched his mouth move, his gaze neither direct nor distracted, I realized that I was about to tap into not just another profession, but an entirely different substrate of the urban layer cake.

There are certain people you meet in life, that after 5 minutes of conversation you realize that you will never see the world the same way again. If you allow it, they will force you to step outside of your comfort zone, and see the world through an entirely different lens.

Having just dropped out of Art School, It was exactly what I was looking for.

It felt real.

A Steady Hand

The training began the next day.

As I approached his house, I counted three trap houses on my way to his doorstep and I nervously waved to the gang members who were eyeing me on my way to his front door. This was an area of Atlanta you didn’t just wander into, this was Boulevard. You had to walk with a purpose.

The job posting rang out in my head “Wusses need not apply.”

He had me come around to the garage and tasked me with doing a test run to see if I had the chops.

Stenciled on the wall were chalked outlines of letters:

“A U R O R A“

He showed me the basic approach and left me to it.

I started with the letter “A”

The first couple lines were shaky. I was discouraged.

When you’re sign painting your face is inches away from the wall and it's just you and the line. Every ounce of your concentration is focused on the bristles moving across the surface and you are aware of every imperfection. But as I moved through the letters I realized I had to let go. I relaxed my breathing and the lines began to get straighter.

There is a zen like focus that comes over you are hand painting typography. It’s just like driving. If you stare at the lines in the road too closely, you will begin to swerve. It’s only when you look into the distance and let your subconscious take over that you get in the groove.

I now recognized that distant stare the sign painter had greeted me with the initial day. His gaze somewhere between what was right in front of him, and a spot beyond the wall behind me.

I finished the final letter which was another “A” and I stood back relatively pleased with the work.

"Hey that's not bad." He said as he inspected my first pass.

"Much better than the other guy that came through here, I think you might have what it takes."

By the time I wrapped up it was getting dark. I put my head down and walked past a crowd that had amassed in the middle of the street. I found my way to my car, happy to see the tires were full of air and windshield still intact.

I had the job.

Scaling Up

Like any apprenticeship, you don’t start with the fun stuff.

First, you have to learn the process.
The prep work.
The long hours.
The part they don’t teach you in art school.

It was tedious, and I was impatient. But I learned quick that you have two options: Embrace the mundane, or quit. The Sign Painter had a military background, and he ran his shop like ROTC.

The methods hadn’t changed much in over a century. A sign painter from 1890 would recognize everything we were doing — the hand-drafts on grid paper, the perforated pounce patterns, the chalk outlines, the mixing of paint, the steady rhythm of brush against wall.

Some guys had switched to projectors to save time, but the old-timers swore by paper. They trusted the ritual, the repetition, and the accuracy.

“Projectors make you lazy,” The Sign Painter would say as he traced the chalk line. “Paper keeps you honest.”

What stuck with me most, though, was what happens when you scale up.

A mural might start on a piece of printer paper—a sketch, a few lines, some loose measurements—but once that same design hits a wall twenty feet tall, every tiny mistake turns into a canyon. A millimeter on paper becomes a meter on a concrete wall. Every spacing issue, every crooked curve, is amplified for the world to see. You have to be accurate from beginning to end.

It teaches you humility.
It teaches you discipline.
It teaches you to think big.

Typography, at its core, is the art of invisible decisions. It’s the subtle adjustments between letters that make a word feel balanced, alive. When you paint those letters by hand, those micro-decisions become physical. You feel the weight of every line and every little decision.

“This will do.” The Sign Painter said as he examined the latest pattern I had spent all day pouring over.

“Pack it up, let’s take it to the client”

Designing for People

Sign Painters wouldn’t have a job without business owners.

Since the early days, for every shop that opened there was a painter ready to mark its place in the world. It was logo design before logos existed.

The business owners we worked with valued authenticity. They were small business owners, barbers, brewers - fellow artisans who cared about the soul of a place. But that came with its own set of challenges.

I learned fast how to read people, how to negotiate, how to communicate value. You showed up, listened to their story, and together you built something that would outlast the week’s receipts.

Art school doesn’t teach you how to deal with clients, this job did.

For a few days, you’d embed yourself in their world. Whether it was a restaurant, a record store, or a coffee shop, you became part of their rhythm. You met the regulars, talk to the owner’s family, maybe got a meal out of the deal. You lived inside the space you were designing for.

In most modern design jobs, you sit behind a screen. You make decisions in isolation, send files off into the void, and watch the results appear somewhere online. Out here, it was different. You had conversations. You met characters. You saw the people who interacted with your work — not through metrics or engagement, but through their eyes.

And people loved the spectacle.

The act of painting — a brush on glass, a ladder on the sidewalk — became part of the attraction. A sign painter at work brought people in off the street. They’d stop, ask questions, snap photos, tell stories about the neighborhood. It reminded everyone that design used to be public, and that the process was just as important as the end result.

But even then, we knew we were working inside a shrinking world.

On the way to every job site, we’d pass blocks of vinyl banners outside of storefronts — cheap, glossy, forgettable.

“Look at that shit sign,” the Sign Painter would grumble.

“No taste,” he’d say, shaking his head. “No taste at all.”

The Vinyl Years

I learned a lot from the Sign Painter, but nothing stuck harder than his hatred for vinyl signs.

We’d drive around the city and he’d point out graffiti, hand-lettered storefronts, and fading murals that had survived decades of weather and neglect. To him, the city was a living story — a sprawling narrative written by those who’d left their marks in paint on brick.

He had a special reverence for an old sign painter from the ’60s whose work still clung to the sides of old buildings throughout Atlanta — though each year, more of it vanished under new construction and flimsy apartment complexes, and he seemed to be the only one aware of him.

“So what happened to him? Why doesn’t he paint anymore?” I asked one day.

“Vinyl signs happened.” he scoffed. “Flat, Soulless, and Disposable. Nobody wants to make anything that lasts anymore. No one wanted to pay him anymore when they could get vinyl cheaper.”

He waved his brush toward a banner within eyeshot across the street.

“It’s everything that’s wrong with the world. If you want to make your mark on a city, You always gotta hand paint.” he said, never taking his eye off his brush stroke.

I realized vinyl signage wasn’t just a matter of taste — it was an omnipresent, existential threat to his livelihood.

It all started in the 80s and early 90s, when everything went plastic.

By that time, large-format printers were everywhere. A vinyl machine could do in an hour what a Sign Painter once took a week to finish. The logic of efficiency won, and many Sign Painters practicing their craft were put out of business.

For Sign Painters, the ’90s were the dark ages. It was an existential moment for the craft.

“So how did they survive?” I asked.

A Creative Alliance

Besides the gold tooth, the second thing I noticed about The Sign Painter was he was covered in tattoos.

Traditional style — bold lines, anchors, mermaids, eagles. The kind sailors used to get.

We often found ourselves in tattoo parlors, they always had work for us. It was the type of designs that demanded precision. Gold-leaf lettering, ornate typography with hairline strokes, the works. Most of it was on glass storefront windows - the most unforgiving surface for a Sign Painter.

I was still an apprentice, and often times these designs were above my pay grade. They required a steadier hand and The Sign Painter would handle these jobs on his own.

That gave me ample time to talk with the artists hanging around the shop, and they answered my question about how Sign Painters survived the 90s.

“At that time you had MTV, Rolling Stone, and all the celebrities getting tattoos. Our clients shifted from criminals to rockstars. Business was booming. And let me tell you — rockstars paid better, and they definitely had better drugs!”

I nodded.

“It was our golden age. Tattoo shops were popping up on every corner and we needed to make our spots stand out, and we sure as hell weren’t going to put up a vinyl sign.”

And so it was.

Tattoo artists, with their insatiable thirst for filling up their canvases created an opportunity, and the Sign Painters who were still standing answered the call.

They formed a brotherhood with each other. While they practiced different disciplines they were both born of the same cloth and appreciated authenticity and the value of hand crafted work.

And that’s when it hit me.

This is how you survive as a creative in this world. Trends shift, technology disrupts, and paychecks come and go.

You had to always be looking for opportunities.
You had to form alliances.
And survival, was a mindset.

Having just dropped out of school weeks before, and I was determined not only to survive, but thrive.

These people had shown me the way.