Daily Type; Mérida, Mexico.

A number of years ago for the duration of 1 year and 11 days my wife and I travelled from Mexico to Argentina. The whole of the journey was graced with many typographic adventures:

Firstly, as I was plotting our journey on the map, contained in the front pages of the worn and well used guide book, consulted everyday as some form of a divine oracle, it became strikingly apparent that our journey was beginning to resemble a huge question mark upon the South American continent. With this revelation the journey became a mystical typographic quest to complete this task.

Secondly, I was especially in awe of the rich and highly skilled hand painted signage tradition common to all South American countries. As Mexico was our first port of call I was immediately drawn to this rich vernacular and began documenting it. Everything was skillfully hand rendered, from Coca Cola signs, shop signs to house numbers. It was infused with a quality and typographic sensibility I feel is absent in the majority of contemporary signage in London or any other English city. It possesses a uniqueness of letterforms and visual diversity which is lost in the perspex or vinyl signage which currently seems to occupy our high streets. 

On one particularly memorable walk according to my diary on Tuesday 27th September 2005,  we were in Mérida in the Yucatán Peninsula, southeastern Mexico and needed to extend our visas to give us enough time to get to Belize without a hectic rush. We set off early to the main Post Office anticipating queues, it was a nice excursion to contrast the previous days of wandering around this colonial city exploring its many markets, churches and museums. The following photographs document that walk, illustrating the unique and diverse approach to the rich tradition of sign painting.

Published in Grafik. July 2010.