Behind the Design of the 2025 OHNY Weekend Sign with Noble Signs
A crowd favorite during last year's Open House New York Weekend and recently featured in the New York Times, Noble Signs is a Brooklyn-based studio dedicated to the art of hand-painted and craft signage in the New York area. It is also home to the New York Sign Museum, a collection of over 40 full-scale rescued storefront signs and dozens of other small pieces and ephemera.
This year, we partnered with the Noble Signs team to design a custom sign for the 2025 OHNY Weekend festival, taking place October 17-19. Read on to learn more about the process and story behind this special project.
During OHNY Weekend, The New York Sign Museum at Noble Signs will open their doors for Drop-In Access, giving New Yorkers the chance to explore the collection and active sign shop where signs are still made the old-fashioned way. Stay tuned for their open hours when the full festival lineup goes live on September 26.
THE STORY
Co-owners David Barnett and Mac Pohanka founded Noble Signs in 2013 out of an appreciation for New York City’s vanishing classic signage. Out of that mission, the New York Sign Museum was born.
Serving as a resource for community members, historians, and designers alike, the museum is a registered nonprofit dedicated to preserving historic signage from around the New York metropolitan area.
The New York Sign Museum at Noble Signs opened their doors to the public for the first time during the 2024 OHNY Weekend festival and have since been offering weekly public tours.
"It's great that we are finally able to open our doors and show people what we've been working so hard on for all of these years, and our involvement with Open House New York has been pivotal in taking that step."
Randall Teeley, Operations Associate
Co-Founders David Barnett and Mac Pohanka
Credit: Bob Krasner for amNewYorkTHE PROCESS
The Noble Signs team was tasked with creating an original sign using the Open House New York Weekend logo, designed by PS New York. The goal was to craft something that felt distinctly New York—classic, handmade, and full of personality.
What was the inspiration behind the OHNY Weekend Sign?
For the OHNY sign, we drew on classic mid-century signage from around New York City, focusing on one of our favorite styles: plastic formed letters over corrugated metal backgrounds.
This type of signage was used across many different businesses from the 1950s-1980s, but was frequently seen on utilitarian shops like electrical, cleaning, and plumbing supply. Because OHNY gives New Yorkers access to many working spaces that are otherwise closed to the public, we felt this pairing evoked that quality of the experience.
What classic NYC sign details did you incorporate?
The lettering design was inspired by local vernacular alphabets, which were often geometric in design with round letters like "O" and "P" built off of a rectangular base form. This quality, when paired with the tubular nature of the vacuum forming process, results in an eye-catching and unique letterform with a tactile quality enhanced by the presence of a visible flange at the edge of each letter.
These letters are then laid over a corrugated background which adds additional visual interest and texture to the composition. For extra flair, we added two bump-out panels in unique shapes which contain flat-cut plastic lettering. For the “Weekend” script, we looked to classic hand-cut script lettering styles.
Hand-drawn pencil sketch of "Weekend"
Credit: Co-Owner David BarnettWhat processes went into designing and making the sign?
We wanted to make the sign beautiful and representative of the types of signs it references, but lightweight, compact and designed to be viewed at eye level rather than from far away. We built it from enameled aluminum sign products including step down corrugated sheeting, bent aluminum sheets and pre-fab trim.
For the bold lettering, we turned to a classic vacuum forming process resulting in clean flanged plastic letters pinned through the sign. The accessory panels are painted acrylic with raised acrylic letters like many of our favorite NYC topsigns. The lettering for all elements was drawn by hand and then formatted for production without the use of fonts, honoring the same design process of the signs that inspired us.
Rendering of the OHNY Weekend Sign.
Credit: Molly WoodwardOHNY WEEKEND
How has participating in OHNY Weekend impacted your work?
The 2024 OHNY Weekend marked the moment that the NYSM finally felt like a public project rather than just a preservation effort. It was our first time giving tours of the space, and now we offer tours weekly.
For Noble Signs, it has helped us understand what people find exciting, new or confusing about the physical work we do, and the process we follow, allowing us to better educate our clients about our materials, processes and the history around these design philosophies.
The 2024 OHNY Weekend marked the moment that the NYSM finally felt like a public project rather than just a preservation effort. It was our first time giving tours of the space, and now we offer tours weekly.
Noble Signs
2024 OHNY Weekend at New York Sign Museum at Noble Signs
Credit: Tiffany TruongWhat can people look forward to when they visit during OHNY Weekend?
People can expect to see a huge variety of large and small scale signs, including many new pieces for those who have come on tours previously. They will get to learn not only about the signs themselves, but also the history of the businesses they represent and the diverse stories they embody.
Visitors will get to explore two floors of our historic building (formerly home to a dress factory), and be treated to several small talks covering the history of signage in NYC and how we navigate the dirty job of finding and rescuing old signs.
Person entering the Noble Signs shop on Atlantic Avenue
Credit: Molly WoodwardSUPPORT THE MUSEUM
How can people support your work?
Follow us on social media (@noblesigns and @nysignmuseum), sign up for a guided tour, get some merch, donate to one of our fundraisers, or volunteer to get involved on a deeper level.
You can also let us know if you see an old sign that might be in danger of coming down. This is a community project and the more boots on the ground we can engage, the more signs we can save, the more local histories we can preserve, and the more we can educate the general public about the value of these irreplaceable pieces of our collective New York story.
"The more signs we can save, the more local histories we can preserve, and the more we can educate the general public about the value of these irreplaceable pieces of our collective New York story."
Noble Signs
IN THE NEWS
Credit: Karsten Moran
Saving New York's Midcentury Signs
The New York Times
Illustration by João Fazenda
Where New York’s Signs and Marquees Go When They Die
The New Yorker
ABOUT NOBLE SIGNS + NEW YORK SIGN MUSEUM
Noble Signs is a Brooklyn-based design studio specializing in handmade signage, custom typography and lettering, and brand and storefront design. Founded by David Barnett and Mac Pohanka in 2013 out of an appreciation for the vanishing classic signage of New York City, Noble represents a new approach to a traditional craft. Fusing art, contemporary design, and technology with time-honored techniques— including hand-painting, gold leaf, and neon— Noble bridges the heritage of the art form into the present. Learn more.
The New York Sign Museum was established in 2019 with the intention to preserve the unique history of signage and businesses in New York City. The New York Sign Museum is a 501(c)(3) public charity. Visitors to the collection will experience the rich history of individual expression and personal character that handmade signage embodies, as seen through the lens of the American experience including small business ownership and neighborhood-based urban living. Learn more.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER, MOLLY WOODWARD
Molly Woodward is a documentary photographer, designer, and writer born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her long-term project, Vernacular Typography, documenting the fading typographic landscape around the world, was fiscally-sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts and exhibited in a solo show at the Usagi Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
Learn more about Molly and her work at photo.mollywoodward.com, and follow her Vernacular Typography project on Instagram at @vernaculartypography.
