Printed signs and painted ones

Walk down an older commercial street in Sharjah and you can still find a few shop signs painted by hand. The letters lean a little. The colours were chosen by someone who cared. One or two are beautiful.

Most of the street, though, is printed now. A shop owner sends a file, and two days later a clean, bright, perfectly legible sign arrives. Nobody would call it art. Almost nobody would call it bad.

Printing did not raise the bar for shop signs. The best hand-painted sign on that street is still better than anything that came off the machine. What printing lifted was the ordinary. The worst signs disappeared. The crooked, faded, misspelled ones are gone, and the street as a whole is easier to read.

There are two easy mistakes here.

The first is to sneer at the printed sign for not being a masterpiece. It was never trying to be one. It was trying to make the typical sign decent, and it did.

The second mistake runs the other way. Once decent is cheap and quick, fewer people pay for remarkable. The sign painters who were very good, and who used to be the only option, lost most of their customers to something that was merely fine. For most of the street, fine turned out to be plenty.

Then something else happens, slowly. With the floor raised, the few shops that want to stand out need a new way to do it, and somebody finds one: a material, a light, a shape nobody had tried, which looks obvious a year later.

Lifting the ordinary does not end excellence. It moves the place where excellence has to be found.