Hi, so recently I reinstalled GTA 5 and in 2020 it's still a fantastic game to play.
I think a big part of its appeal has to be the setting of Los Santos, its
satirical Los Angeles, right down to the famous Vinewood sign. Now to err on the
side of caution I won't be showing or naming the real sign on which it is
based, for legal reasons that have been explained in a different youtuber's video.
Needless to say you are familiar with the sign, in fact these might be the most
famous letters in the world. There is just one detail, one glaring oversight,
that annoys me to an unreasonable degree.
And once I point this out to you, you'll never see this sign the same way again.
I'm happy to report that the Vine Wood
sign in GTA does not suffer the same sins as the original. This sign was
crafted digitally sometime between 2010 and 2013 and the physical, original sign
was made some 90 years before that in 1923. Made by the Crescent Sign Company
to advertise the Hollywoodland real estate development, the sign was only
intended for use for about 18 months. According to type historian Rob Roy
Kelly the type style on which the sign is based probably dates back another 90
years, back to the 1830s. Take a look at this early wood type specimen - I mean,
that ampersand is amazing! Seeing as it was never intended to be permanent,
this style of lettering was perfect for quick and cheap fabrication seeing as it
only has straight edges. Much easier to fabricate than curves at such a large scale.
The "-land" part of the sign was removed in
1949 and after years of deterioration the sign was completely rebuilt in 1978
at a slightly smaller scale. Which leads me to my main issue: seeing as it was
rebuilt from scratch over 50 years later, why did they let this happen?
In font design letters are not mathematically perfect.
They are tweaked so they look right to the human eye. This is called "optical
compensation". An example can be found with curved letters like O. They don't
sit exactly flush with flat-topped and flat-bottomed letters, but to the eye
they appear aligned correctly. The same is true for variations within each
letter. The stroke that makes up each glyph will be slightly thicker and
thinner in different places and the angles of intersecting lines will
slightly differ. Take this imaginary capital W. Here's what it would look like
if it were mathematically perfect. Symmetrical angles with every vertex
located where these lines would logically intersect. But that's not what
we see in real fonts. While all these Ws are symmetrical, the stroke widths
slightly change and the angles and intersections all vary. Here is the W
from the Vinewood sign in Los Santos. It's a perfectly fine W. Here is a big W
from Los Angeles, California. See how the construction lines intersect in awkward
ways? It sticks out worst in the negative space left by the downward pointing
vertices. They look like little fangs, but this W clearly needs to see a dentist
for those crooked teeth. It's just a nightmare! [Alarming music].
I don't blame the designers for this mess. I think that they answered their
brief: make a big real estate ad, make it last for 18 months, who cares
if it's perfect? But it would have been so simple to fix when they remade the
sign in the 1970s. They were starting again from scratch! Did no one even think
to do it right this time? If all of the letters were slightly quirky, a little
bit off from perfect – that would be one thing. That could be charming. But this is
just one letter and that's not charming. That's a lack of care. Those crooked
teeth will always be the first thing that jumps out at me whenever I see this sign.
Even though Rockstar Games based their
sign on a ready-made font they clearly spent hundreds of hours making this sign
and hundreds of thousands of hours designing the world of Los Santos. This
attention to detail is part of what makes these worlds so captivating and
part of why this series has been so enduring. Let's compare the physical sign
in Los Angeles to another famous typographic landmark: the welcome to Las
Vegas sign. This was made to a completely different brief. They wanted to make
something globally recognized and they succeeded. The sign's designer, Betty Willis
passed away at the age of 91 in 2015. There's an amazing interview with
her on YouTube and she is clearly a craftsperson of the highest caliber. She
is proud of her work and her eye for detail. Even if you are not a fan of the
glitzy Vegas aesthetic you have to admit it really succeeds at projecting how
Vegas wants itself to be perceived. And watching this woman talk about her work