The ghost of San Francisco Camera sits on the windows of a 2nd floor storefront on Market and 6th where many of the photos from my zine come from. The repair shop is long gone, but I thought it would be cool to use it’s faded hand painted visage as inspiration for American Analog’s logo.
To research my logo, I started with an iPhone photo that I warped into a more straight-forward perspective using the Frontview app. I then ran this through a few font detecting apps, like What The Font, and quickly realized this was not going to a matter of simply matching a font because there was no single font used. The lettering appears to be a mash-up of various fonts. The iconic “A”, for instance, is sometimes drawn with a stylized rounded edge at the top, and others in a more traditional sans serif font. The C’s, N’s and S’s also vary.
Instead of matching the font, I decided to reconstruct it, using the characters available. After all, “San Francisco Cam” contains all but 3 of the letters I needed, which I could easily fake. I also decided to tweak the SLR styled clip art, to look more like the LC-A camera I used for my zine. Here’s how it turned out.
And here is how that logo could look on a flier.
Although I love the idea of this logo, I’m not sure I’m digging how it looks currently. I’ll tweak it a bit more this week and see if I can get it to look less cartoony, but still hand drawn and imperfect. What do you guys think?
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