Vegas - It's All About the Typography!

I'm visiting Nevada for the first time next week. The thought of hiking in the desert and touring the Hoover Damn has always intrigued me. Las Vegas on the other hand was not a place I ever cared to visit but when a friend invited me I gave it a second look and said yes. Winters in Ohio can seem like a lifetime. Cold snow and dark days leave me wanting to move to a warmer climate. The first snow is beautiful but the remaining months can take a toll. One can only put up with scraping the ice off their windshield, battling the icy roads and wearing a heavy coat and boots until April for only so long. Leaving this environment for just a week is a gift.

What made me change my mind about Las Vegas? A luscious hotel off the strip, a pool, warm weather (of course) and day trips to the desert. Best of all, I will be taking photographs of signs.
Yes, signs. I am am obsessed with typography. I Pin it, I create it, I manipulate it and I spend many hours drooling over it. When I was a student at The Columbus College of Art and Design, hand lettering was part of the curriculum - way before Adobe suite and all the other digital design programs. Through drawing existing type, I learned to see design in a very different way. I am enamered with the talent of type design and type designers. Las Vegas seems to me like the perfect place for typographical inspiration, obviously because neon signs are everywhere.

While researching for this blog entry, I came across a blog by a Thomas Hawk, a photographer, called Digital Connections. My Google search, signs in las Vegas led me to a particularly interesting entry, "Las Vegas City Life on the Neon Museum Controversy." The Neon Museum? Yes! Now that seems more exciting than gambling.

Thomas's entry discusses  his "difficulty in obtaining permission to photograph the Neon Museum’s neon boneyard, a collection of old and historic neon signs in Las Vegas." and the Neon Museum's newly implemented copyright laws.

www.http://thomashawk.com/2006/09/las-vegas-city-life-on-neon-museum.html

It looks like I won't be sharing any photos from the Museum but I will definitely be snapping pics of neon on the strip. I came across an app called Fontly. Fontly - a web and iPhone app, lets users discover, share and track typography by location. Fontly also helps to preserve many of the world's typographical wonders. I hope to share these wonders on Fontly and with you. Hopefully you will be inspired by the many sign, vintage and new, of Vegas. If you have an iphone, check out Fontly!

Who knows, I might like Vegas better than the desert. Either way, I won't be wearing a coat and boots!