John Downer

Signs painted on a removable substrate survive as collectors’ items. Books published on sign painting show card writing provide an abundance of information on materials methods used in the sign trade; they guide a contemporary practitioner in the traditional style. Downer continues down the path of commercial brush lettering while adapting his personal notions of letterform and proportion to computer-based design of type; he introduces a particular, non-typographic genus of alphabet to the Type Network library of fonts.