New at bl.ag online, 'Letterheads Per L'Horta: An Intimate International Meet', with my review of Spain's second such gathering of sign painters, calligraphers, lettering artists, and graphic designers.
https://bl.ag/letterheads-per-lhorta-an-intimate-international-meet/
#silentsunday #video #craft #signwriter #signwriting #boveytracey
Short clip of Aaron Stephens demonstrating the craft of signwriting at the Bovey Tracey Craft event 2025.
This short film I'm making about veteran Hackney signwriter Brian Walker is very close to fully funded.
Please help to push it over the line by either by throwing some £$€ into the hat or boosting/reposting this to reach others that might want to support micro-budget independent filmmaking.
The kickstarter for me next short film is showing as 94% funded. Will you be the one that tips it over the finish line before Monday's deadline...
PS. The next short film in the series is being funded on Kickstarter, and there are eight days left to back it, including the opportunity to get your name in the credits:
With the US dollar in freefall, there's never been a better time for those in Europe, the UK, and Australia to join BLAG, which is priced in USD*.
And you can save even more on your first year with the Mastodon/Fediverse special offer at https://bl.ag/md20, which includes the latest issue (https://bl.ag/06) sent right away.
*My loss unfortunately!
Abdi Sultani's latest 'Trust Signwriters' is fun:
"This is an English-Kiswahili potpourri, but we believe the signwriter could have done better in his mixing things when using the two global language together. For instance TYPING should have been followed by etc (short for etcetera) and not nk (short for na kadhalika). And then, what’s the N doing before the last letter T in the word we all know as INTERNET? Trust signwriters!"
The Boyd is Back in Town
https://ghostsigns.co.uk/2025/05/the-boyd-is-back-in-town/
Boyd Pianos’ ghost sign on Shaklewell Lane, London E8, revealed again after 13 years’ hibernation.
(Relatively) New at bl.ag online, 'Brush Up Your Single-Stroke Skills at Letterboy's Block Party', with Jenna Homen test driving a new online course.
https://bl.ag/brush-up-your-single-stroke-skills-at-letterboys-block-party/
I'll also be delivering a short session during Saturday's BLAG Meet: Inside Issue 06 (https://bl.ag/meet).
This is'ot strictly connected to the latest issue of the magazine, but I'm using the free, online event to share details of my forthcoming Kickstarter that aims to raise funds to finish a short film I've been working on: When Better Letters Met Brian Walker.
You can pre-register for the Kickstarter now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/samroberts/when-better-letters-met-brian-walker-a-short-biopic?ref=9wh6qg.
Sneak preview of a little film project I've had bubbling away in the background:
It's going to be the fifth in the 'When Better Letters Met' series:
https://bl.ag/tag/when-better-letters-met/
Boosts appreciated for this 'pre-launch' page on the kickstarter that will go live next month 
"When I open a can of paint, I just love how it looks; I almost want to drink it." — British artist Richard Wright on training to become a signwriter.
From the Art Newspaper (@theartnewspaper@bsky.social) interview here: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/03/28/richard-wright-when-i-open-a-can-of-paint-i-just-love-how-it-looks-i-almost-want-to-drink-it.
PS. I've added Wright to the list of 'celebrity' sign painters here: https://bl.ag/celebrity-signwriters-past-present/. Thanks as always to Tony Mead for the ongoing tip-offs.
![It was definitely a pivotal moment of crisis and re-evaluation. I had a sense of tremendous disappointment in what I was doing, a sense of inadequacy and failure—that the work wasn’t good, that it was one bad painting on top of another. So I destroyed all the paintings I had made. This wasn’t a conceptual thing; it was because I thought they were shit. Training to be a signwriter wasn’t about changing my direction as an artist; it just struck me as a way that I could maybe make some money. I was good with a paint brush, I love lettering and I’d done a lot of design work for posters over the years. But something happened in the process of learning [signwriting] and it was to do with the delivery of the material. Painters express themselves, whereas a signwriter wants the delivery to be invisible. The artist’s personal touch is such a big facet of modern painting, and signwriting freed me from that because it is just the paint on the thing; it doesn’t pretend to be something else. Any symbolic aspect had been emptied out. It drew me to the language of graphics, and I could go to the studio with just the idea. When I open a can of paint, I just love how it looks; I almost want to drink it.](https://typo.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/256/712/276/303/947/original/8545737027f81754.jpg "It was definitely a pivotal moment of crisis and re-evaluation. I had a sense of tremendous disappointment in what I was doing, a sense of inadequacy and failure—that the work wasn’t good, that it was one bad painting on top of another. So I destroyed all the paintings I had made. This wasn’t a conceptual thing; it was because I thought they were shit. Training to be a signwriter wasn’t about changing my direction as an artist; it just struck me as a way that I could maybe make some money. I was good with a paint brush, I love lettering and I’d done a lot of design work for posters over the years. But something happened in the process of learning [signwriting] and it was to do with the delivery of the material. Painters express themselves, whereas a signwriter wants the delivery to be invisible. The artist’s personal touch is such a big facet of modern painting, and signwriting freed me from that because it is just the paint on the thing; it doesn’t pretend to be something else. Any symbolic aspect had been emptied out. It drew me to the language of graphics, and I could go to the studio with just the idea. When I open a can of paint, I just love how it looks; I almost want to drink it.")
Sign writing has been in unicode for a decade. Does anyone know of experiments to use it in URLs / DNS?
I got interviewed for a podcast, and you can listen from about 22 minutes here: https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-stack/653/
My segment lasts about 12 minutes and I talk about BLAG, what I'm doing with the magazine, the community that is forming around it, and the wider world of the Letterheads.
Thank you to Mae-Li Evans and Monocle for inviting me to be a part of it.
@Travsletters Welcome! For getting started, I recommend following lots of people, and then unfollowing/muting to fine tune your 'feed'.
You can have a look at the people I follow for ideas: https://typo.social/@blag/following.
And also at the activity and members on typo.social https://typo.social/public/local
Hashtags are worth following, although so far #SignPainting and #Signwriting are pretty quiet!
For more general tips, follow/take a look at the @FediTips account and website: https://fedi.tips/
Following the recent influx of new folk across the fediverse — welcome! — here's a new #introduction to me, Sam Roberts.
I am the editor and publisher of BLAG (Better Letters Magazine) at https://bl.ag, and part-time Ghostsigns blogger at https://ghostsigns.co.uk/blog.
I'm a Londoner living in Sant Pere de Ribes, Catalonia, Spain, and here on Mastodon I tend to tag with #SignPainting, #Signwriting, #Lettering, and #Ghostsigns, plus ocassional tangents.
Portrait: Yanina Shevchenko, 2024.
'The Burds Are Back in Town, and It's Bristol' is the latest at bl.ag online, with a report from the recent gathering of women, trans, and non-binary sign painters.
OK, follow-up #AskFedi #RSS question: What are your favourite (active) feeds for topics such as #SignPainting / #Signwriting #Lettering #Typography #GraphicDesign #Ghostsigns?
Mine is at https://bl.ag/ or https://bl.ag/rss, and here are some others I already follow:
The Anvil by BLAG sub-editor Jenna Homen:
https://jennahomen.substack.com/
Overall Murals:
https://www.overallmurals.com/journal
@letterformarchive News:
https://letterformarchive.org/news/
@FontsInUse Blog:
https://feeds.feedburner.com/FontsInUse
Continues...
Some lovely ghost signs in Jenna Homen's latest despatch, and my ears are burning: https://jennahomen.substack.com/p/the-art-of-disappearing
Thank you @insertdaniels (IG) for this BLAG panel inspired by the tradition of ox-cart (carreta) decoration in Costa Rica. And the work of Sarchí's Don Luis.
This decorative artform is the topic of a BLAG 05 article (https://bl.ag/05), and there's even more in the accompanying digital companion at https://bl.ag/the-blag-05-digital-companion/.
Reminder: Fediverse folk get a discount on BLAG, which includes issue 05, at https://bl.ag/md20
