Owner: Clover Signs Blog URL:http://cloversignsblog.com/ Join Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 04:01:38 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: london based blog displaying house sign making techniques and related craftsmanship and artwork Site statistics:Click here
Slate House Signs 2007-09-10 11:27:45 The big news is that we now make SlateHouse
Signs! Many people seem to want them, so we have sourced some fantastic quality black slate for the signs:
The signs are 6-8mm thick, and we sand blast the letters into them. We then finish the letters with real gold or palladium. The hand painted artwork looks great on the natural stone.
If you want one - you can buy a slate sign here.
Share This
HDU Sign Forum 2007-09-07 09:56:01 Hey, Today I found a Internet forum dedicated to High Density Urethane. The forum is called: HDU Sign Makers Forum
The forum is new, but hopefully others will post some pictures of their work there.
Share This
Pheasants 2007-09-04 07:15:02 Here is our most popular piece of artwork from last month:
Pheasants seem to be popular on country cottages and look great on dark green or black.
Share This
Trains on House Signs 2007-08-31 02:19:32 This week’s most requested pictures for house signs seem to be trains. We have painted 3 different trains for customers - so if you want a train on yours, now would be a good time (as we are getting good at them!)
Here is one we have just done.
Share This
Read more:House
, Trains
Door Signs 2007-08-22 09:40:19 It’s difficult to find any door signs beyond the vinyl and metal ones everybody sells. We often make sets of beautiful door signs for nursing homes or anywhere that needs to display a better image.
Door signs are not currently displayed on our website, but you can simply contact us with your requirements, and we will do some designs for you.
Share This
Sign Making Articles 2007-08-15 10:35:05 We have started posting useful articles on traditional sign making covering art, design, carving etc.
You can find them all here: The Traditional Sign Maker
If you want an article written, or wish to post an existing one on your website, please get in touch and we will help you.
Share This
Read more:Articles
Where do House Names Come From? 2007-08-10 08:00:19 After much research, we have put together a article on house names and their history. You can read the article here: The History of HouseNames
.
House naming is an interesting subject, and I am sure we will add to the article at a later date. Until then, here is a wonderful quote from A.A Milne:
THE Piglet lived in a very grand house in the middle of a beech-tree, and the beech-tree was in the middle of the forest, and the Piglet lived in the middle of the house. Next to his house was a piece of broken board which had: “TRESPASSERS W” on it. When Christopher Robin asked the Piglet what it meant, he said it was his grandfather’s name, and had been in the family for a long time. Christopher Robin said you couldn’t be called Trespassers W, and Piglet said yes, you could, because his grandfather was, and it was short for Trespassers Will, which was short for Trespassers William. And his grandfather had had two names in case he lost one—Trespassers after an uncl
Mackintosh House Signs 2007-08-07 11:33:49 Charles Rennie Mackintosh is celebrated around the world as one of the most creative figures of the early 20th century. We often get asked to replicate his unique artwork onto house signs.
This design is carved into the surface of the sign and overlaid with palladium. We sourced the design to show to the customer before they ordered.
The fact is, we can replicate most artists work onto your sign for you, so if you are looking for this, simply fill in the custom sign form, and describe or email the art you want.
Share This
Read more:House
Big Company Mistakes 2007-08-02 07:36:13 Why is it we get customers so happy that we respond to their email within minutes? Why are people in the UK so shocked when they receive good customer service?
As companies in the UK get larger, it seems they sacrifice good customer service to save money. Here is my list of the 5 worst mistakes a company can make:
Taking Too Long to Respond
Nobody likes to wait - so why do some companies promise a response within 72 hours? Who can afford to wait that long for an answer? We try to respond within 1 hour, and start apologizing when it takes more than 4. Also, holding a customer in a phone queue for over 20 minutes while telling them “you call is important to us” is not the way to convince people to do business with you.
Not Knowing Anything about Their Products
It is an annoying trait that companies will employ sales and technical staff who don’t know anything about the product they are advising on. When will companies realise that if all the “technical depar
Chinglish Signs 2007-08-02 04:33:01 I love Chinglish Signs. For those who don’t know, Chinglish is English translated from Chinese badly.
I bought a bunk bed recently, and was amazed to see the safety label:
I’m not sure if you are meant to loosen the screwshave or tighten them?
Anyway, here are a couple great resources for Chinglishaholics:
Flickr - Chinglish Pool
http://www.chinglish.de/
Share This
House Signs for Property Developers 2007-09-25 02:55:55 Property developers often approach us for sets of matching signs to go with a group of properties. This set is going out today to a developer in Jersey:
By the way, these are rather attractive properties although less so for those of us not that interested in living in Jersey. Have a look anyway at www.leclosdupressoir.com.
Share This
Read more:House
, Developers
Winnie the Pooh House Sign 2007-09-22 05:27:53 Winnie the Pooh has got to be one of England’s most popular storybook characters as well as being a personal favourite of mine. We have done quite a few Pooh Bear house signs now. Here is a scene from the hundred-acre woods that I think is really nice:
Of course the thing that makes it great is the fact that it is based on the original artwork by Ernest Shepard rather than the Disney cartoons. (Apologies for the mis-misspelling of ‘Hunny’ on the sides - obviously a bit of a slip-up!)
If you like this click through for a gold on green sign.
Share This
Read more:House
, Winnie
Egyptian House Sign 2007-09-18 03:19:10 Recently, a customer requested their house name written in Egyptian
hieroglyphics. By making use of an online translator, we were able to write their name correctly. We then added some scarabs and other Egyptian symbols, all carved and gilded. The result was pretty stunning:
This sign was requested through our free bespoke sign design service.
Share This
Read more:House
Guide to Producing High Density Urethane Signs 2007-09-14 05:42:30 We have just published a guide to creating High Density Urethane Signs. It was made mostly for sign makers, but any customers might be interested in seeing the process that went into their sign.
The article has pictures all the way through, so it’s pretty easy to follow. Hope you enjoy it.
Share This
Read more:Guide
3D Sculpted House Sign 2007-10-01 05:37:57 Every so often we get a request for a 3D Sculpture. Although this is obviously quite a lot of work, some of the results are truly amazing. Check out this fairy tale scene -
Using HDU makes sculpture much easier than when using wood. HDU has no grain and is easier to carve. The person with the chisel still needs to have an artistic eye though.
This sign is carved out of one thick piece of HDU. You can easily request a sculpted sign using our custom sign page.
Share This
Read more:House
Picture Perfect 2007-10-13 07:44:16 They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and some of our customers obviously agree. In addition to ordinary house signs, we are occasionally asked to make signs which have no words, just a hand painted image. Here are two examples, a fish and three badgers, painted in a matching style:
To see a gallery of available artwork, or to request a custom picture, go to our image gallery.
Share This
Read more:Picture
, Perfect
, Picture Perfect
‘The House’ House Sign 2007-10-10 07:25:08 A house name for the imaginitive: &lsquo
;The House
’. There do seem to be some houses called this, which could lead to a rather (un)interesting address:
The House
The Street (yes - there are several streets in England with this name)
The Village (in Greenwich)
or The Town (a part of Enfield)
I doubt you’d get very far with ‘the county’ but it might be worth a try. In any case, here’s a sign with a slightly more descriptive name: ‘The House at West Green’.
Find out more about house names. Read this article on the History of House Names.
Share This
BackBox 1.0 Launched 2007-10-09 08:37:08 At last I have put together a proper explaination of how to install the scripts we use to make our image slideshow on our custom house signs page. You can now get proper instructions and download a zip file with all the right scripts in it.
Check out BackBox 1.0!
Share This
Read more:Launched
Google Index Speed Test 2007-10-08 05:47:47 I wrote a post on Friday regarding how fast pages are added to the main GoogleIndex
. In the test, I linked to the blog post from Digg. However, it may be that Google just picks it up from the RPC-Ping.
Here is a test of just that. Before I wrote this post, if you searched Google for the words “google index speed test” you came up with no results when you used the quotation marks.
I will post this and see how long it takes to appear. It might appear in the results without the quotations as well, but I want to see exactly when it appears.
Here we go:
11:48 - Posted
11:57 - Picked up via Technorati tags on Tagcentral which is indexed, but the post is not
12:04 - Scraped onto someones spam blog
12:05 - Picked up and added to Googles main index
Pretty fast - 17 minutes from post to index. It also appears right of the top of the results even without the quotes.
The next test will be to see how fast pages which are linked to from a blog post like this one get indexed. Read more:Speed
Minty Fresh Indexing - 18 Minutes! 2007-10-05 05:12:52 It used to be that to get into Google’s index was a process that could take days or months. However, Google now seems to be indexing pages at a blinding speed. You can read Matt Cutt’s report on “Minty Fresh Indexing
” here. He writes about one of Skrenta Blogs posts, and about how it got indexed within an hour or so.
Skrenta has a PR6 home page, hence a new blog post can get indexed very fast via a normal RPC blog pinging service.
But what about just a normal static page? How fast can they get indexed?
Clover Signs wrote an article about how to calculate the height of text for signs. When it was published, there was only one link pointing to that page. It came from the index page of the articles. Google does not crawl that page very often, and didn’t crawl it at all the day that day.
10 minutes after it was published, I submitted the article to Digg, as it has interest to any graphic designers. Then an amazing thing happened:
11:50 - Article publi
Fairy House Signs 2007-10-04 09:42:23 Fairies and butterflies are some of the most popular things to have on a house sign. Our customers frequently request images like this one:
Try an image like this one on Slate!
Share This
Read more:House
Complex Mashup 2007-10-15 06:42:11 “Mashup
” is a word you often hear these days on the web. For those who don’t know, a Mashup is:
A mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia also mentions that a Mashup was originally a music term, for aggregating 2 or more songs or tracks into one.
Hence I would like to tell you about my favorite mashup. For anyone who hasn’t listened to or watched Les Misérables, you should. The characters all have various songs they sing during the performance, then just before half-time, they all sing the song “One Day More”.
You can listen to the song on the Les Mis website here. Turn up the volume and let it blast. It is a truly inspirational piece of music. Here are the lyrics so you can read along:
VALJEAN
One day more!
Another day, another destiny.
This never-ending road to Calvary;
These men who seem to know my crime
Will surely come a second time.
One day more!
MARIUS Read more:Complex
Driftwood House Sign 2007-10-22 08:11:49 Holidays are never long enough. We just made a sign from someone who wished to extend theirs with a picture. Our artists were able to copy their favourite holiday snap, creating a long-lasting reminder of a summer day in Spain. Unfortunately, the first attempt by our artists was in the wrong proportions, not leaving adequate space for the desired text. The painting was so stunning, however, that we could not face simply binning it. Somebody had the bright idea to put it in a driftwood frame to produce a brilliant piece of art. The frame is not real driftwood, but a more durable HDU imitation. Check out the final house sign, as well as the one we messed up - decide for yourself which came out nicer!
On our house signs website, we offer a lot of standard signs for people to choose from. However, we can create almost anything (like the above example shows.) The best way to get something like this is to fill in the form on our custom signs page.
Share This
Read more:House
Daffodils on House Signs 2007-10-25 04:57:08 Although they only bloom in the springtime, daffodils are clearly an all-year-round favourite on peoples houses. While signs with flowers such as primroses and azalea are popular only during the bloom season, daffodil house signs are still being requested now, while the leaves are falling.
Here is a typical example, ordered by a customer in the US:
Have a look at some of the other flower designs on offer in our gallery.
Share This
Read more:Daffodils
, House
House Sign, Castle Sign 2007-10-30 02:45:38 Every Englishman’s home is his castle…. The adage has been in use for at least four hundred years. According to a blog post on Quoteland, the earliest recorded use is found in a 1581 guide to early years education written by a man named Richard Mulcaster. As early as 1642, Thomas Fuller used it with a tone of disillusionment. In any case here’s a sign from someone whose house still is, at least in name, his castle:
This style of artwork - gilded outline drawing - is rapidly increasing in popularity. Request yours through our custom signs service.
Share This
Read more:House
, Castle
Firmenschilder 2007-11-03 09:25:18 Everybody knows that one of the most important things in any business (not to mention the rest of life) is networking. We used to call it working together. In any case, my wife and I spent a long weekend last week with signmaking acquaintances at Sannerz Designs near Frankfurt, Germany. They also work in HDU, the synthetic wood we use for our carved signs, but focus on business signage as the Germans haven’t yet caught on to the habit of naming their houses.
Although their business structure is quite different to reflect differences in the nature of the markets, we learned a lot from each other, as well as having a smashing weekend, and not neglecting to invest in a little German quality beer and chocolate.
Some of their work is absolutely breathtaking, like this crest - they made a set for this brewers various outlets.
In the networking line, I recently stumbled upon a forum for HDU signmakers. Hopefully we can share our knowledge in this rapidly growing area of business.
Poppyfields House Sign 2007-11-10 06:40:45 It is getting to be that time of year again. As Remembrance Day comes closer, poppies start appearing on nearly every suit and jacket.
Each year, I remember these lines from John McRae’s famous poem - maybe my favourite war poem of all time:
…To you from failing hands we throw
the torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields
The full text can be found at inflandersfields.be
Here is quite a nice sign from our range of cream and black house signs.
Share This
Read more:House
Its Another Tequila Sunrise… 2007-11-15 09:09:53 Are you thinking of the movie, the song, or the drink? Its funny how some words or phrases just sound good. TequilaSunrise
is a 1988 Robert Towne movie starring Mel Gibson. It is a single by the Eagles (1973) and by Cypress Hill (1998). Most commonly, however it is a cocktail, and quite a nice one. The name comes, of course, from is appearance as the grenadine and orange settle fading from red at the bottom to clear tequila at the top.
According to the International Bartenders’ Association (IBA) it is a ‘long drink’ meaning it contains rather more mixer. The official recipe is as follows:
4.5 cl (3 parts) Tequila
9.0 cl (6 parts) Orange juice
1.5 cl (1 part) Grenadine syrup
Clover Signs has also made its own (humble) contribution to the scene with the sign below:
Like it? Find another Gold and Black Carved House Sign.
Share This
Read more:hellip
‘The Barn’ House Sign 2007-11-19 16:54:40 For a simple, no frills house sign, this real-gold on sand-blasted slate is hard to beat. It is highly visible, with an elegant, uncluttered look. Best of all, it is made of real 23 ½ carat gold on best quality black slate and could easily last 30 or even 50 years.
For more signs like this one, have a look at our range of slate signs.
Share This
Read more:lsquo
, House
Pet Sheep House Sign 2007-11-23 06:52:43 No, this is not just a picture of a sheep. This is a detailed painting of a customer’s pet sheep - based on a photograph. Now retired, this particular sheep has apparently enjoyed quite a successful career taking multiple awards at shows in the glory days of its youth. It took us several tries, with us taking photos of the sign painting and sending them to the sheep’s owner for approval, to get it perfect - we even managed to restore its youthful appearance by removing some of the greying hairs from its head.
No extra charge for custom paintwork. Contact us to find out how you can have your pet on your house sign!
Share This
Read more:Sheep
, House
Recommend Site To A Friend
