A Small Notebook on an Old Trade
Signwright is an independent journal about hand-painted signage — the layout, the materials, and the slow discipline of getting a line to sit right on a board.
Why Signwright Exists
Most writing about signage online is either a supplier catalog or a design-trend roundup. Neither one spends much time on how a fascia actually gets made — the spacing decisions, the material trade-offs, the things a painter learns by ruining a board once.
Signwright is an attempt to fill that gap with short, specific pieces: how optical spacing differs from metric spacing, why enamel on steel holds up the way it does, what actually goes into pricing a hand-lettered job. We are not a shop, and we don't sell signage. We publish notes.
We also keep Layout Sheet, a small free tool that mirrors the layout math in this journal, for anyone who wants to check a design before committing paint to a board.
The Masthead
Rosalind Ferro — Editor
Has painted fascia and window lettering for eighteen years, mostly on high streets built before 1960. Handles most of the layout and technique pieces.
Marcus Yun — Contributing Writer
Trained as a gilder before moving into writing about materials — enamel, primer, and why some substrates hold paint better than others.
Delia Okafor — Contributing Writer
Runs a two-person sign shop and writes the business-side pieces — pricing, scheduling, and client conversations that don't go the way you'd hope.
Tobias Marsh — Research
Spends most of his time in trade archives and old signwriting manuals, tracking down where a technique or a term actually came from.
How We Work
A short list of rules we hold ourselves to, mostly because it's easy to drift without them.
- Every article is written for this journal — we don't republish or lightly rewrite other people's work.
- We don't accept paid placement, sponsored posts, or product reviews in exchange for compensation.
- When we get a fact wrong, we correct the article and note the correction at the bottom of the piece.
- Historical and technical claims are checked against trade sources before publishing, not repeated from memory.
- Layout Sheet is offered as a free companion tool; nothing on this site is for sale.
Corrections, Pitches, and Arguments About Spacing
Write to us at hello@signwright.shop. We read everything, even the disagreements about kerning.