Public lettering in all its forms—official inscriptions on buildings, commercial graphics, signs, epitaphs on tombstones, graffiti—is a fixture of urban life. In Public Lettering, Armando Petrucci reconstructs the history of public writing in the West and traces its social functions from the eleventh century through the modern period. Taking the city of Rome as a case study, Petrucci begins with a consideration of the first civic inscriptions after ancient times. Substantial chapters on the uses of public writing in the industrial revolution and the early twentieth century prepare the way for his provocative discussions of public lettering in the the contexts of fascism, post-war radicalism, and the student revolutions of 1968 and 1977. Throughout, Petrucci is concerned with the relations between the functions and styles of letters and the places where they appear. Writing, he argues, is one of the instruments of public power; display lettering is often the image and mirror of power itself, making the social use of written forms a type of conquest. Because of Rome's role as a “World-City,” Petrucci's interdisciplinary study has wide-ranging implications for our understanding of the social function of graphic design.

Learn how to master the medium—and how to go with the watercolor flow—to create one-of-a-kind lettered art and calligraphy that reflect your personal style. In this stunning follow-up to her highly praised and influential first book, The Art of Brush Lettering, lettering expert and workshop instructor Kelly Klapstein (popular on Instagram as @kellycreates) shares her secrets for mastering the essential techniques for creating lovely modern lettering and calligraphy with watercolor. Start with the basics, from choosing paints, brushes, and other supplies to preparing your paper for painting. Learn to handle watercolor paints with essential strokes and warm-ups. Explore painting letterforms in a variety of styles, from traditional to modern. Try a range of creative techniques, including blending ombrés and rainbows, creating pictorial letterforms, and combining watercolor with other mediums. Enhance your lettering with special touches by complementing it with handpainted backgrounds and simple illustrations. “Plenty of beautiful examples are included and they are really easy to re-create just by following the instructions which are always clear and concise. The letters with the beautiful colour transitions look so good. This is a very hands-on and practical book that I can easily recommend to beginners.” —Parka Blogs

The essays in this collection discuss how the city is ‘textualized’, and address many aspects of how texts and images are written and produced in, and about, cities. They demonstrate how urban texts and images provoke reactions, in city-dwellers, visitors, civic and political actors, that, in turn, impact upon the shape of the city itself. Many kinds of urban texts – both manuscript and print – are discussed, including chapbooks, periodicals, poetry, graffiti and street-signs. The essays derive from a range of disciplines including book history, urban history, cultural history, literary studies, art history and urban planning, and explore some key questions in urban cultural history, including the relationship between text, image and the city; the function of the text or image within an urban environment; how urban texts and images have been used by those in positions of power and by those with little or no power; the ways in which urban identity and values have been reflected in ‘street literature’, graffiti and subversive texts and images; and whether theories of urban space can help us to understand the relationship between text, image and the city. As such, this volume will serve to enhance the reader’s understanding of the nature of urbanism from a historical perspective, the creation and representation of urban space, and the processes of urbanization. It investigates how the creation, distribution and consumption of urban texts and images actively affect the shaping of the city itself – a mutually constitutive process whereby text, image and city create and sustain each other.

This is the first scholarly collection to examine the social and cultural aspects on the worldwide interest in the faded remains of advertising signage (popularly known as ‘ghost signs’). Contributors to this volume examine the complex relationships between the signs and those who commissioned them, painted them, viewed them and view them today. Topics covered include cultural memory, urban change, modernity and belonging, local history and place-making, the crowd-sourced use of online mobile and social media to document and share digital artefacts, ‘retro’ design and the resurgence in interest in the handmade. The book is international and interdisciplinary, combining academic analysis and critical input from practitioners and researchers in areas such as cultural studies, destination marketing, heritage advertising, design, social history and commercial archaeology.

This new text for students and practitioners in public relations has been built on the acclaimed Critical Perspectives in Public Relations, also edited by Jacquie L'Etang and Magda Pieczka, which is no longer in print. Many of the liveliest minds on the public relations scene have contributed fresh ideas and diverse perspectives: their locatio

Editing the Image looks at the editing of visual media as both a series of technical exercises and as an allegory.