Time of the signs

Roger Robinson balances on a plank of wood suspended between two ladders, painting a Drummoyne cafe sign in an expansive cursive script. He has roughly chalked the cafe's name on to the awning but is otherwise painting freestyle. Despite this, and the fact he is working metres in the air on a surface he mildly describes as ''not ideal'', the sign is flawless.

''It is a dying art,'' he says of hand-painted signwriting. ''We call ourselves the dinosaurs of the industry, the hands-on guys. These days we're few and far between.''

Art and craft ... Roger Robinson in front of his mural at a Drummoyne cafe.

When Robinson, who has his own sign-writing and mural business Artwrx, started his apprenticeship 50 years ago, signwriters tackled a long list of tasks, including For Sale signs, shop fronts, gold-leaf gilding and billboard advertisements.

Most signs that dominate cityscapes today are made of vinyl-cut letters, produced on a computer then stuck on, or digital signs produced on big flat-bed printers.

''Digital printing, it's robbed 90 per cent of the sign trade,'' says Craig Wilson, who at 44 is one of the younger signwriters still doing traditional hand painting. After an apprenticeship with the RTA doing road signs, he joined signwriting company Althouse & Geiger. ''When I started, we used to employ five or six signwriters, and now there's just me.''

Robinson often walks past a computer-printed sign and thinks: ''Oh god, isn't that terrible? The spacing's all out.''


Computers don't have the artistic nous required for the subtleties of a job, he says. For instance, computers often print with equal space between each letter, which can look wrong. ''If you've got an L and an A,'' he says, ''you've got a big space between the letters. You've got to reduce the space to make it look right, but that doesn't always happen in computer-cut lettering.''

Richard Bentley, who owns Signs by Brush in Bathurst, says computers have made things simpler, but have meant a loss in human skill and creativity.

''It's made it more accessible to people that haven't been trained,'' he says. ''There's lots of people in the world who are computer literate, so for them to pick up a signwriting program and put it on the computer, it won't be long before they can print signs or cut out vinyl letters. But they haven't been taught the method of choosing the correct colour, the shadowing, the background. A lot of the guys now are just sign installers.''

As their industry has gone digital, the artistic training of traditional signwriters has helped them supplement their incomes.

Bentley builds and paints horse-drawn carriages, and does a lot of art and signage on vehicles. Robinson, who went into sign-writing because it looked easier than life as a struggling artist, paints murals.

Sign Painters, a book published late last year documenting American signwriters, notes a renaissance in the US of hand-painting, fuelled by a growing interest in artisan pursuits. But in Australia the future looks uncertain. Even if there is a resurgent interest in hand-painted signs, Robinson says, there will soon be no one who can do it.

Bentley is more hopeful. ''What I want to do is pass my knowledge on,'' he says. ''I think we all have a passion for our trade. I don't know what's around the corner, but I'll just keep on with my signs, keeping a tradition alive.''

There is some vindication for these ''dinosaurs of the industry''. The cafe sign Robinson is painting was originally done in vinyl-cut lettering, which after only three months started peeling off the awning. ''This happens quite a bit,'' he says. ''I get called in to fix up the disasters.''

It seems there is a place for the old methods at least a little while longer.