Tiki Tag Topper - Collecting Tiki

T tikicar Member York, Pa. Joined: Feb 19, 2005 Posts: 106	T tikicar Posted posted on Tue, Sep 30, 2008 4:53 PM I posted this on here to find out more information and to see if there are any other tiki tag toppers out there. Not to get on a debate about new or old or computer type. I love it either way. I bought it right and it will look sweet on my roadster when it is ever done. I found one reference to it here on tiki central. There was one sold on ebay last year. Might have been this one? It is under Tiki Gardens, Indian Rocks Beach/Indian Shores, FL (restaurant) I restore cars for a living so I know a thing or two about paint. It is old paint. The discoloration takes years and a lot of them. The discoloration on the back where a decal once was again takes years as it has discolored the paint like a stain on cloth. It was either a price decal or maybe an original makers foil decal. This is not the same as crazing a mug to look old. Todays paints are not the same as years ago. They are not the same as even a year ago in most cases. Go buy a can of Krylon spray paint and it is now different than a few months ago. Just like how a new carving looks to a old carving. Some things just take time to create the look and no fake way can make it look the same. If you look in the book of tiki there is a matchbook on page 51 for Mecca Bar. The type is the same as gardens on the topper just stretched out. My brother happens to be visiting me right now. He is a commercial artist and has been since before computers were used for art or type setting etc. You know when there actually were real artists. Here is his explanation on how it was done without computers. Hello; My take on the tag topper is that it looks original. I have been doing commercial art for over 35 years and it doesnt have to be done on a computer to have uniform shaped letters. A good sign painter can make his hand painted letters shaped the same time after time to the point you can overlay them with little or no difference. When I started most fonts were all either hand lettered or set in lead type for printing. As a rule I draw my original art at least twice as big as the final print size so that any flaws are almost invisible in the final print form. Even if that tag topper was hand cut art the original mechanical art would have probably been close to 18" to 24" long. At that scale it would be easy to make the type near perfect. And there is no reason that it had to be hand cut art since any decent size 1950's art house would have had movable typeseting machines and large format graphics cameras to shoot film positives for screen production. While I agree with the other poster that the fonts used are similar to fonts he says were created in the 1980s... most modern fonts are some derivitive of older commercial or hand lettered fonts. It took only a few minutes searching to find a font nearly identical to that used on this tag topper, the only difference was that it was a condensed version. So many font designers create similar or nearly identical fonts simply to avoide royalties. On a daily basis I use a commercial computer typesetter that has at least 3 phonebook size type books all containing similar versions of the same type but with different names. If you go on line there are endless choices of free or for sale fonts also. When you spec a type for a job the art programs automatically brings up a defult window asking you if it is ok to substitute a similar font if you have not actually loaded that font with your job file. Since I do not know the actual production date of this tag topper I can not say that the other poster is wrong with his assesment of the type fonts or age. But as someone that works in this industry I know that it is hard to know the date of creation for something like a font style because there is too much inspiration from or copying of previous work. Just last night on the tv show "Chuck" I noticed that the credits were set in a font to mimic the old "Dymo" lable maker machines. Now I have 30+ year old dymo lables on my file cabinets and I know I handlettered a piece of art in the 1980s to simulate this font. By the logic of the previous poster, my file cabinet can't be real because that "chuck" font was only designed in the last 10 years. I am not looking for a debate, just as the previous poster said... putting in my $.02

I posted this on here to find out more information and to see if there are any other tiki tag toppers out there. Not to get on a debate about new or old or computer type. I love it either way. I bought it right and it will look sweet on my roadster when it is ever done. I found one reference to it here on tiki central. There was one sold on ebay last year. Might have been this one? It is under Tiki Gardens, Indian Rocks Beach/Indian Shores, FL (restaurant) I restore cars for a living so I know a thing or two about paint. It is old paint. The discoloration takes years and a lot of them. The discoloration on the back where a decal once was again takes years as it has discolored the paint like a stain on cloth. It was either a price decal or maybe an original makers foil decal. This is not the same as crazing a mug to look old. Todays paints are not the same as years ago. They are not the same as even a year ago in most cases. Go buy a can of Krylon spray paint and it is now different than a few months ago. Just like how a new carving looks to a old carving. Some things just take time to create the look and no fake way can make it look the same. If you look in the book of tiki there is a matchbook on page 51 for Mecca Bar. The type is the same as gardens on the topper just stretched out. My brother happens to be visiting me right now. He is a commercial artist and has been since before computers were used for art or type setting etc. You know when there actually were real artists. Here is his explanation on how it was done without computers.
Hello; My take on the tag topper is that it looks original. I have been doing commercial art for over 35 years and it doesnt have to be done on a computer to have uniform shaped letters. A good sign painter can make his hand painted letters shaped the same time after time to the point you can overlay them with little or no difference. When I started most fonts were all either hand lettered or set in lead type for printing. As a rule I draw my original art at least twice as big as the final print size so that any flaws are almost invisible in the final print form. Even if that tag topper was hand cut art the original mechanical art would have probably been close to 18" to 24" long. At that scale it would be easy to make the type near perfect. And there is no reason that it had to be hand cut art since any decent size 1950's art house would have had movable typeseting machines and large format graphics cameras to shoot film positives for screen production. While I agree with the other poster that the fonts used are similar to fonts he says were created in the 1980s... most modern fonts are some derivitive of older commercial or hand lettered fonts. It took only a few minutes searching to find a font nearly identical to that used on this tag topper, the only difference was that it was a condensed version. So many font designers create similar or nearly identical fonts simply to avoide royalties. On a daily basis I use a commercial computer typesetter that has at least 3 phonebook size type books all containing similar versions of the same type but with different names. If you go on line there are endless choices of free or for sale fonts also. When you spec a type for a job the art programs automatically brings up a defult window asking you if it is ok to substitute a similar font if you have not actually loaded that font with your job file. Since I do not know the actual production date of this tag topper I can not say that the other poster is wrong with his assesment of the type fonts or age. But as someone that works in this industry I know that it is hard to know the date of creation for something like a font style because there is too much inspiration from or copying of previous work. Just last night on the tv show "Chuck" I noticed that the credits were set in a font to mimic the old "Dymo" lable maker machines. Now I have 30+ year old dymo lables on my file cabinets and I know I handlettered a piece of art in the 1980s to simulate this font. By the logic of the previous poster, my file cabinet can't be real because that "chuck" font was only designed in the last 10 years. I am not looking for a debate, just as the previous poster said... putting in my $.02

Post #410885 by tikicar on Tue, Sep 30, 2008 4:53 PM