07 August 2009

[pdx] New Street Blades Sighted: SE 47th And Hawthorne

2187.Another new street blade set, picture-perfect, SE 47th Avenue and Hawthorne Blvd, by the Hawthorne Vision Clinic. Type face: that beautiful, sophisticated Clearview:



What really caught my eye is the tracking along the whole of the specific and the directional. The letterspacing on this sign is, while not being immaculate, about as close to perfect as I've seen on one of the new breed of street blade. Also, the line-spacing (leading) between the 1500 and Blvd is appropriate. The display seems very un-forced. All the type in this blade lives where it's supposed to. God is indeed in His Heaven.

And, for the numbered avenue:




Not bad, either, though there's more space between the directional and the specific than there is between the specific and the generic (notice how the 'Th' superscript seems to invade the space between it and the AV?), making it feel unbalanced.

This is a valuable sighting because we can now have some idea of what this style will look like for the longer street names. I have yet to see what a Martin Luther King Blvd blade (or a Cesar E Chavez Blvd blade, for that matter) look like – those will be the defining example on the long street name.

Speaking of Chavez, no blades are as-of-yet up along Thirty-Ninth Avenue (at least the segment between SE Hawthorne Blvd and East Burnside Street). It's a forlorn hope to think that I'd be the first person to get a picture of it, but it's my forlorn hope.

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