Future to the back

The main sign after …

The signs were ahead of their time. Which wasn't good.

So the Delta King asked me to yank them back into the 19th Century where they belonged. Which was good for me and a fun challenge.

Directional sign before …

Here's how the signs looked (right):

The Delta King is a 285-foot sternwheel steamboat, permanently moored to the Old Sacramento embarcadero as a floating hotel, restaurant and theater.

It was built in 1924 and with its sister the Delta Queen served passengers from Sacramento to San Francisco, and even up the San Joaquin River aways.

Painted battleship gray and renamed USS Delta King during World War II to transport naval reservists, it next showed up on the Hudson River before becoming a floating bunkhouse for aluminum plant workers in British Columbia.

The current owners found it nearly 30 years ago, sunk but reparable in Richmond in the San Francisco Bay; they towed it to Sacramento and renovated it.

The Delta Queen went on to ply the Mississippi River and now also serves as a floating hotel, moored on the Tennessee River at Chattanooga.

Serviceable and easy to read, the Delta King's signs nonetheless ran afoul of code restrictions in Old Sacramento, requiring signs to befit the decidedly lower technology of the Gold Rush era in which the city began. Out went the painterly background and the photograph of the trademark red paddlewheel. Out went the collection of 20th Century typefaces — Brush Script Pro for "The Pilothouse," Trajan Pro for "Delta Bar & Grill" and Univers 57 for most of the rest (thanks to my designer son Liam for his keen eye). Even the lively logo for Suspects dinner theater had to go — a 20th Century creation.

The biggest challenge was rebuilding the paddlewheel to resemble an engraving. The wheel has a lot of parts; the illustration of the wheel many more.

The sign went through several iterations, from showcard every-typeface-at-your-disposal dizziness to the result, legible simplicity and muted colors.


The new typeface, Rosewood, is not strictly 18th or 19th Century, but a digital evocation of slab serif types, cousin to Clarendon, an early 19th Century face cut in England. Rosewood is designed with an elaborately decorative alternative (right):

Not everyone likes Rosewood; someone would likely call me out as a fraud. It has the clunky chunky inelegance the project needed.

The URL at the bottom of the main sign, jarringly 21st Century, is set in Clarendon bold.

Directional sign after …

Woodcut dingbats for balance, typographic elements for flourish, et voilà!

Though I work just a block away part-time as a tour guide for the Sacramento Underground, I hadn't been over to the Delta King during the signs' makeover.

I was working instead from the client's proportional dimensions of the existing signs, and in my mind the sign was never bigger than my computer screen.

My stomach tripped and fell when I finally saw the immensity of the main sign, some six feet wide. My ego couldn't wait for the new sign to go up, and after consideration by the commission on antiquarian signage in Old Sacramento, the sign is up for the tourist season.

Someone has already put a dent in the directional sign. Signs live a hard life in Old Sacramento, as my other signs in the neighborhood can attest.

Come on out and look, if you fancy a notion.

The main sign at work, alongside 19th Century signs typical of the era.

The Delta King, forever churning up a lazy river …

Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind …

Signs bloom like wildflowers in Old Sacramento and, in the absence of protests to the contrary, I'm going to show you more of 'em. These pix come courtesy of Heather Lavezzo Downey, the city's interpretive specialist. The signs are part of a broader project by the Historic Old Sacramento Foundation and the Center for Sacramento History to inform visitors about the origins of Sacramento.

Somewhere in back of this Waterfront Park sign (left; click to get a close-up) is a real steamboat, the Delta King, which did its work (including as a troop transport during World War II, painted Navy gray!) in the 20th Century, and now is a hotel and theater. Though part of Waterfront Park, the restrooms are not the focus of the sign. You can find smaller interpretive signs along Waterfront Park now, too.

Heather got much better pix than I did of the Lauriet Assay site, where signs have blossomed as well (left and below). It's a quirky site: You can see below the sign the foundation of the buildings and the hollow spaces beyond. Someone has put doors where the brick-barrel vaults were, and created small narrow shop spaces (unused at the moment). Right behind the sign would have been the Assay office, where Prof. Lauriet weighed miners' gold and assigned value to it.

Heather wrote the text for the signs, and has a great way of engaging visitors to think about how they would have lived in Sacramento during the gold rush, and the decisions they would have made.

I'm sure I mentioned it before, but "gold rush" wasn't in use until 1860, more than a decade after the gold rush began. California-bound gold seekers were more likely to call their venture "going to see the elephant." Since a circus elephant was sure to be the most exotic thing Americans had seen up to that point, adventurers equated their Westward journey with it. Whether they struck gold or not (and it was usually the latter), they would say they had seen the elephant.





























Also, they often called themselves Argonauts, after the Greek myth of Jason, assigned the task of finding the golden fleece. Jason and his sailor searched aboard the Argo; thus, Argonauts, sailors of the Argo, because whether traveling by actual ship or covered wagon across the plains (which is hard to do in a ship), they looked like windborne sailors on a mission. Now you have 1/47 of my Underground Sacramento tour for free. You're welcome.

Signs have gone up around the base of Pioneer Park, so that while visitors approach the strange sight of cast-iron pillars holding up nothing but the shade, they can find out why these ancient ruins are there. While one person reads and learns, another, having read and learned, refreshes himself with drink; a little girl uses her sign to hide; the traffic cone seems transfixed by the new information.

Follow the signs: New work

Close-up on a stern-wheeler that churned only the Sacramento of my imagination.

I just wrapped up illustrations for new signs that will enhance visitors' time in Old Sacramento, the original center of the city, hard by the bank of the Sacramento River (and I mean hard by). The signs are designed to illuminate what visitors are seeing (beyond the touristy obligation of candy and T-shirt shops set in some old looking building or another), and are a small part of larger plans to connect visitors to the strange beginnings and tenacity of this town. Stop by and see 'em: They should be up by spring.

Actual size, almost six feet. (I'm stoked!) Mount Diablo peeks through the 19th century haze in back.

Smaller signs throw light on details about each Old Sacramento site.

It was a chance to work with Lisa Park of Oakland, whose specialty is environmental and exhibit signage, and with Sacramento historian Marcia Eymann and interpretive specialist Heather Downy. An adventurous journey and a blast, every minute of it.

First go, just to get the feel. I like the swoopy shape of steamboats.
Thanks to Mark Twain and John Hartford, I love steamboats in general.

Stern-end variation.

Here is the evolution of the first set, for Waterfront Park, which is the system of piers on Front Street where the Delta King, a stern-wheeled steamboat turned hotel and theater, resides (and where the Hornblower company runs smaller tour ships along the river). The larger sign, above, explains to visitors where they are, and the smaller ones focus on details about the place.

I'll post the evolution of the other two signs soon.

I wanted to picture a busy river in this variation. What goofy perspective, though.

The challenges with all the drawings were manifold:

1. They should evoke the printing technology of the 19th century. The final art is a sort of hybrid of a woodcut kinda lithograph kinda engraving; in my ham-handed way, it required hundreds of tiny elements, all drawn righthanded with a mouse in Adobe Illustrator (I'm a lefty, and never have I desired an electronic tablet more than on this project).
2. They should be less about art and more about documentation, as if the illustration was intended to record events of the time.  The final work should have a certain stiffness about it.
3. The steamboat itself presented its unique challenges. What kind of steamboat, for example? The assignment was for something like the Delta King, but also not. Like its sister, the Delta Queen, the King was built in the 20th century and had a long and checkered service, including military transport during World War II. It's the iconic steamboat many people have in mind when they conjure riverboats, but it's huge and has more of a showboat feel. I wanted to picture more of an unsung workhorse of the river.
4. The illustrations had to be flexible: The larger sign at each place had a deeper arch shape than the smaller fact-laden signs, so the artwork had to be wide enough to fit in the slightly different shapes but still read well and look like they fit organically.

Time to start paying attention to shape. Hey, nothing fits so well!

Steamboats on the Sacramento came in a variety of sizes and designs, and many appeared to be built strictly for utility and looks that only a mother ship could love. In the end, I created a hybrid of a beautiful brute, a composite of elements that adds up to no steamboat in particular. It has passenger berths but also spaces on the lower deck for farm goods and supplies.

Closer, but where's the gangplank?

It was also important to show Sacramento in its very early days, when ships would have run up to bare banks, long before piers and wharves.

I wanted badly to picture a side-wheeled steamboat, very popular on the Sacramento, and strangely elegant, like the Antelope, which carried the first Pony Express rider to San Francisco. But they seemed too exotic, since none run the river anymore.

The smokestacks are very tall, to keep the embers from landing on the stern and burning the ship, but they caused problems fitting into the arch, so I had to chop this smokestack, section by section, at the risk of inaccuracy.

By the way, Old Sacramento will soon be digging up its past for all to see. In my spare time I work as a tour guide in Sacramento's new Underground Tours, showing visitors how this city saved itself (from itself) by lifting itself above river level. An extreme case of shortsightedness, fueled by greed and gold fever, put Sacramento in danger in the first place, since it was founded right at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers. It turns out (shocker!) those rivers tend to overflow their banks in the winter, which threatened to destroy the city when it wasn't being burned down or gutted by cholera. So existing buildings were eventually lifted an average of one story high over some 60 blocks, and the levees raised, to keep the river back.

Watch this space for the next sign illustrations!