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Call for Papers: What’s Your Sign? Retail Architecture and the History of Signage

Deadline April 01, 2018

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For as long as goods have been bought and sold, shopkeepers and traders have visually communicated their wares through signs. This special issues of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding explores the evolution of signage from the shutter paintings of ancient Pompeii to the wooden trade signs hanging along Medieval English streets to the neon of twentieth-century American roadside signs. How have symbols of selling shifted over the centuries? How do retail signs reflect or reject broader visual cultures? What technological shifts have precipitated the most dramatic design departures?

Papers may examine the iconography, typography, and materiality of retail signs as well as the cultural, financial, and geo-political forces that shaped storefront signs in the past. Papers may also address the future of retail signage in an increasingly digital and global economy.