Abstract

Shop signs may be considered as quintessential urban markers of business and trade in different kinds of marketplaces in a city. They allow us to unravel the fascinating dimensions of visual culture in different cities of India. There are two kinds of cities that we have identified in this research, namely traditional and modern. A total of four city shop signs data has been analyzed, of which Jaipur and Hyderabad are the traditional cities and Mumbai and Chennai are the modern cities of India. In the content of any shop sign, information operates at three levels: shop name, tag line and background sign panel that represent the morphological structure of a shop sign. As material objects of a larger visual culture, shop signs signify business identities with the aid of certain visual attributes. Of these, we could observe color as the primary visual attribute that identifies and differentiates information levels within and across shop signs. Color imbibes an art of persuasion in the visual communication of design of a shop signboard. Certain simultaneous movements or changes in one or more color characteristics against specific time periods have been identified as period specific trends of color attribute in shop signs in our study. The objective of these trends may or may not be clear. However, their nature and direction is guided by certain socio-political popular themes as well as themes that guide the visual language of color display in the eponymous movie posters in India. The color trend analysis in this paper reveals that such trends are useful resources to retrieve information about color characteristics as well as their diachronic evolution in the design of shop signs in India