SE ROTULASEROTULASEROTULA

Editorial Banqueta publishes small guides to things that are about to disappear. Issue 3 is about rótulos: the painted signs on taquerías, tire shops, and pharmacies, which are being replaced by printed vinyl at a rate its editors had started to count.

The zine had to work on the street, in a back pocket, as a guide for walking the Eje Central. It also had to do right by painters who have spent forty years not being credited.

Two inks, a run of 200, and 28 A5 pages from folded A4 on bond that the riso wouldn’t jam on. It had to retail at 120 pesos and still pay the two painters we interviewed.

Reproducing the signs in color photographs was out. A photo of a sign also tells you nothing about how it was made.

Sign painters build a letter in two passes: the body in the expensive color, then a shade in a cheap one, down and to the right. That is already a two-plate process, so I printed it that way. Blue carries the letter, yellow carries the shade, and the misregistration of the machine does the wobble a brush would do.

I set no text in a font that imitates brush lettering unless a painter told us it was close. Body copy is Courier, the voice of a quote written on an invoice pad.

Pages run in walking order. If you go down the Eje from north to south, the book turns with you.