 really excited to be at TypeCon. This is our first TypeCon and excited to be in Portland, a great neon town. And we want to share with you our fascination of letter forms when they're illuminated at night. And we're going to just kind of take you on a little travelogue of some of our favorite signs and how quirky some of the letter forms are. But we want to give you a little background first of how this fascination started with us. And I'm supposed to move the slide. This is a postcard of San Francisco's Market Street in the mid-1950s. When Randall and I first saw this postcard, we were just amazed at the sheer volume of commercial neon signage lining both sides of the street. However, if you were to visit the same spot today, you would notice that only one of these signs is still remains on the building. The rest of these signs are in the dustbin of history. So once we realized that so many signs had been lost, and we thought, let's document what's left. And we were surprised to find over 200 really beautiful neon signs in our city. And the other thing that we discovered is that they represented sort of a dying thing that was prevalent, which is small business run by mom and pop. And that's where we found the neon sign. So like a lot of photographers, you document something, and then you become an advocate for the thing that you're documenting. And that's what happened to us. And so we've really started to work to preserve the small businesses and their neon signs and the legacy business in San Francisco. And we try to consult and help restore them. And really, we're always looking for old postcards or old movie clips to help us know what the signs look like in the neighborhood and the colors. And we found this really great clip that we want to share with you guys, which is basically that postcard in motion. And this is from the Getty Archive. This is 1965. Trip down Market Street. So you can see it's not just theaters, but dentists and shoe stores. Every business had a neon sign. Abongos would wake you guys up this morning. So it doesn't get any better for us than neon letter forms inside donuts falling from the sky to splash into a cup of coffee. And this is one of our favorite signs in San Francisco. And one that we're really hoping to preserve. And so this is just one of our projects. But just to back up a little bit, we decided to try and find out how do these neon signs work. And Tom Bernaldi has a book out, Great Book, New York Neon. And he had this beautiful 1930s illustration. And I'm not a scientist, but I know a really great technical drawing when I see one. And this really illustrates what's inside of an atom. And basically, the neon tube is vacuum sealed. They pump it full of neon gas. And they put an electrode on either end, one's positive, one negative. And then it connects at the bottom into a transformer. And when you turn on the juice and the electricity goes through it, all those little atoms get basically energized and emit photons. And that's what makes that beautiful neon glow. The atoms get excited. It's exciting. This is an illustration from a product catalog from the 1930s. And it says Claude Neon. George Claude is considered the father of neon. And he made sure that he was considered the father of neon throughout his career. And this is a great example of something that would be called a spectacular. The word sign wasn't good enough for something this ambitious and this beautiful. So they're known as spectaculars in the industry. Now, how do you get the colors in a neon sign? And they're made by the noble gases. And we call them neon signs. But in fact, you can use any of these noble gases inside one of those vacuum tubes. All of the gases in the slide is what they would look like in a clear tube in their natural state. And the red orange is the familiar neon. But really, most of the signs you see have argon in them. And that's a bright blue if you put a drop of mercury in it. And then the krypton xenon and helium are subtler colors. And you usually see those more in neon sculptures. But we have a wider range of colors when the tubes themselves are coated with a phosphor coating with a certain recipe that make all of these different colors. And then you can also have colored glass. And this is an example of a glass called Novial Gold where the glass itself is colored. And this is our teacher, Neon Tupender, Shauna Peterson. And she is the rock star of Neon and Emeryville. And I'm just going to do this so you can actually see her flipping the tube. And it's red hot from the flame. And then she puts it on the pattern and bends it exactly to fit the pattern. And this is a great example that every neon sign that you see is completely made by hand. There's no way to mass market these or for machines to make them. And you saw how hot the glass gets. And you saw how hot the glass gets when she puts the wood on it. So just thinking how much time it takes to make every bend. This is an illustration, or this is actually a pattern. Just simply to make the letter A in glass tubing, you can see that it requires seven bends. So a tube maker is doing this upside down and backwards and generally thinking two to three bends ahead of the bend they're actually working on. So you can see it takes many, many years to become proficient at this skill. There aren't many people who do it. And once you've seen how tough it was to make an A, just think of the effort it takes to make this beautiful. The iconic Portland, Oregon sign. We did a tour last night with Kate Woodows. It was so much fun. And she gave us this great slide that shows what the original Portland sign looked like when it was for white satin sugar. So if you haven't seen the sign, go up on the Burnside Bridge and take a look. And find Kate and get her great map of Portland neon while they last. This is one of the signs we looked at last night over on Third Street. And we're going to take you a quick little travel log now and really point out some of the, just point out the quirks of letter forms and some of our favorite signs across the Western states. This one in particular, we love the lower case N in the middle of all the upper cases. The Laurelhurst Theater, something we've noticed in Portland is a popular usage of stacked and tapered lettering, as you see in the vertical sign there. Yeah, it's a kind of a Portland thing. We love the little west that leads into Moreland. This is, if you need to order a salami, you can do it anywhere in the United States. If you go to Katz's Delicatessen on Houston Street in New York. We love the electrification of the TV lettering in this sign. And the little curlicue on the Continental Club. The extended F on the Ferris Wheel sign at Lakeside Park in Denver, which is a neon museum in and of itself. Every single ride has its own unique neon sign and we love the big geometric O's on the bumper cars. Quite often neon signs, particularly roof signs, are hidden in plain sight by day. Particularly in Las Vegas, but at night, they dominate the landscape. This is one of my favorites. Really clever use of Bolega Cowboys wearing chaps to create the letter M. This was for the MAPES Hotel, which is long gone. But Will Durham saves this sign as part of the Nevada Neon Project, so it's in good hands. Cowboys are a theme, as you can see, but pay attention here to the lowly motel letter forms of all the motel signs in all the world. This one has that great little bit of pizazz on the crossbar of the T, the E, and the L that just really make it stand out. This is unique individual letter forms for the Tewa Lodge. It's just great how the D is just springing straight out of the crown for Duke photography. And you can't really go wrong slapping any kind of a letter forms on a giant neon cow. Sometimes people ask us, how long does a neon sign last? And the answer is, we don't know yet. This is a great sign that's in a private collection at the bungalow in the boulders, and the owner showed us a postcard from 1942. So this sign has been around over 80 years. The sign was sent, this postcard was sent to him by the librarian at the Lord'sburg, New Mexico Library. Now, if you're in Glendale, you've got to make a stop at the Museum of Neon Art and take Eric Link's Wiler's double decker bus tour, but definitely go inside. You can have a look at the Brown Derby and San Francisco favorite, the tip top in. We really appreciate the proper use of an apostrophe, even for a pool hall. And the stacked up O's and Harper pools is a definite favorite. I like the way the cross piece or the cross bar on the T protects the S. And sometimes a letter form becomes the sign itself. This was once a cocktail lounge, it's no longer a cocktail lounge, it's something else. But they saved the sign. Paddock Bowl, this sign, the bowling ball and the pins are animated, and it's great how it interlocks with the script. And the ball travels down the lane and hits the pins and the pins go flying, all in neon. A very common motif for neon is the night owl. Fish are another common motif for seafood restaurants and sporting good stores. We love how the L and the I look like they have bubbles inside them. View Alcatraz, there is a coin operated telescope under this sign, so the tapered word view kind of lends itself to distance. And this sign goes back to the early 40s in San Francisco. San Francisco's very proud of their penitentiary. All right, the hara is actually a favorite place we like to hang out, and it was pointed out to us that the cross bars go upper and lower, creates a little rhythm. The G on this public parking sign how it morphs into a directional arrow into the garage. And this is probably the only time you'll see the word hot tubs in neon at a reputable motel. One of the things that we love is the fancy the. And we are always gathering examples of that. And when we were asked to design our first neon sign, we were so excited that we got to design a fancy the for the Avenue Theater, which is a beautiful theater that the sign's just been restored in San Bruno Avenue in San Francisco. And we try to get involved in as many preservation projects that we can and support people contact us. And we're always ready to make phone calls and write letters. And we're encouraged by the director of the American Sign Museum to put on a festival and symposium for preservation. Basically, Todd Swarmson said, there's a national movement to preserve neon signs, but we don't know it yet. So we all got together. Kate Widow's helped us produce this really fun weekend of people from all over the Western States to share information about how to save neon signs. And the great thing about these beautiful signs that are all made by hand is they also represent small business in America, which is definitely something worth putting time and energy into. This is a great example of a neon shop and open, Jim Rizzo's neon works. He's restored and saved all of these signs. Yeah, so we hope to do Neon Speaks again and would love to see you guys there. We also do walking tours in San Francisco and it'd be fun to show you that, but neon is having a renaissance and it's great that so many people are getting interested in it, but we gotta kinda remember where we came from. And for so many decades, neon signs were considered blight and Hollywood had something to do with that. So we're gonna show you a little mashup that we did of neon scenes for mostly Film Noir, the Film Noir era and you'll see it kinda goes from the sublime to the gritty. The rise and fall of neon. Here we go. And you'll also notice there are letter forms in just about every scene. I think you should see all of these movies. Well, thank you very much. One thing we like to say is that if you have any interest in neon signs and if you would like to see them preserved and restored, one of the things you can do, it sounds simple but it's very effective, is to go into a business that has a neon sign, make a purchase and be sure to tell them that you like the sign. You'd be surprised how much that means to people who own and maintain and take care of these signs. Because it does take some work. They need tender loving care, but because they're made by hand and they're green, they last forever a lot longer than a LED sign. We do walking tours in San Francisco. We start our season in September. If you're in the Bay Area, we'd love to see you on a walking tour and show you some neon. I've got some, everybody's got great printed items so we've got some postcards so see us if you wanna San Francisco neon postcard and thanks Tycon so much for having us. We really love being here. Thank you.