Signs are actors. Some are wallflowers, barely speaking above a whisper, while others shout and flirt, beckoning for attention.

A No Parking sign intimidates, while the facade of a car dealership grins ear to ear with wolfish eyes. Typecasting is inevitable—certain typefaces, colors, and treatments carry built-in associations. But as visual tastes shift and cultural values evolve, so too does our sense of what a sign should do and how it should behave.

Just as dialects vary by region, signage speaks in localized accents. On Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, a stretch long associated with glamor, entertainment, and counterculture, signs act as anchors for fantasy—fixing it into the physical landscape and offering it up for consumption. Ed Ruscha’s decades-spanning photographic survey of Sunset charts how signage responds to shifting ideas about style, aspiration, and visibility in a city built on performance.

What people desire, and what they are told to desire, is always changing. Consumers want what feels modern: new products, new styles, new technology. Signs both advertise that promise and embody it; a sign that doesn’t look current stops working. These changes register across both culture and surface: from Betty Page to Kim Kardashian, gas to electric, marquee boards to neon, vacuform signage to vinyl lettering.

The evolution of signage along Sunset in the second half of the twentieth century serves as a visual record of changing priorities for Los Angeles and for the American consumer at large. The particulars of each sign—its typefaces, materials, construction, and scale—reveal a gradual turn away from idiosyncrasy and craft. What has replaced them is standardization, speed, and surface. In time, glamour was traded for convenience, individuality for branding, permanence for disposability.

Supersized Selling

Though the mention of American signage may conjure the glow of Times Square or the spectacle of the Las Vegas Strip, in Los Angeles no form looms larger—both figuratively and practically—than the mighty billboard. The dominance of the format in the city has everything to do with how, when, and where Los Angeles was built. The immense, arid landscape of Southern California—divided by mountains, ravines, and waterways—provided an ideal stage for the mass adoption of the automobile in the early decades of the twentieth century.¹ The resulting sprawl, designed primarily for car travel, demanded a specific and bold visual vocabulary: signs that could hold up against distance or speed. This dispersed urban form gave rise to a local affinity for signage types that are seen less often in other American cities—places whose major growth happened earlier, and which rely more heavily on public transit or on highways buffered by open land.² Even the ads on bus stop benches (8789 Sunset Boulevard, 1966) in Los Angeles are scaled and composed for visibility from the road, designed more for drivers than for the bus riders seated upon them (who, in fact, obscure the advertisements altogether).

By the 1970s, LA had earned the dubious title of “the nation’s capital of the billboard,” a distinction that reflected over-saturation more than praise.³ Nowhere was this proliferation more visible than the Sunset Strip and West Hollywood. Billboards dot the landscapes of Ruscha’s 1966 photographs of this portion of Sunset Boulevard, advertising everything from liquor (8255 Sunset Boulevard) to tourist attractions (8760 Sunset Boulevard) and tires (8878 Sunset Boulevard). Some of these billboards are more modest in scale, their graphics neatly contained within the frame of the billboard; they occupied inexpensive space to rent and were inexpensive signs to produce. Many of these smaller signs, like an advertisement for Empire Insured Savings Bank at 9059 Sunset Boulevard, sell necessities, not indulgences, and their design reflects that: tidy and functional.

Other 1966 billboards break the frame entirely. As is the case just west of 8301 Sunset Boulevard, image and text extend beyond the edges of a sign’s rectilinear scaffolding, integrating into the landscape like a real world collage—or maybe more like a proto-pop-up ad. Compared to smaller billboards, many more of these oversized signs gesture toward fantasy and indulgence. Take the United Airlines billboard nearest to 8349 Sunset Boulevard, which advertises air travel through portrait photography and sculptural typography that peeks above the frame. Just down the road, a Bank of America ad for traveler’s checks (8835 Sunset Boulevard) offers a very different message: set in a utilitarian sans serif and visually contained within the frame. Both speak to travel, but only one is selling a fantasy. These boundary-breaking billboards persist well into the 1980s (see 8743 Sunset Boulevard, for example), 1990s (near 8349 Sunset Boulevard), and 2000s (7901 Sunset Boulevard). They appear less frequently as time goes on.

Despite the presumed driver-centricity of the billboards on the Strip, some signs are so tall that they stretch beyond the viewfinder of the camera Ruscha strapped to the back of his pickup truck (see 8590 Sunset Boulevard, 1973; 8570 Sunset Boulevard, 2007; and 8901 Sunset Boulevard, 1995). Winking at the viewer from beyond the frame, they offer truncated glimpses of text, as in 1966 at 8820 Sunset Boulevard, rather than coherent messages.

Some of the most iconic billboards Ruscha captured on Sunset in the 1960s and 1970s promoted musicians (nearest 8301 Sunset Boulevard, 1973), live performances (8469 Sunset Boulevard, 1966), and album releases (8282 Sunset Boulevard, 1973). This particular genre of entertainment signage can be traced back to the 1960s, when an executive at the record label Elektra saw the remarkable impact that billboards had along the bustling Las Vegas Strip. What better place, he thought, to replicate that effect in Los Angeles than the Sunset Strip?⁴ The resulting ads announcing local talent became a rite of passage—proof that an entertainer had, quite literally, made it big (8469 Sunset Boulevard, 1973)—and they helped to solidify the association of the Strip with show business and self-promotion for years to come. These music-industry billboards also drew the attention of other artists besides Ruscha, including photographer Robert Landau, whose work documenting rock and roll billboards of the 1970s has become an important archive in its own right. “The Strip was like a gallery,” Landau reflected, “with signs as the works of art.”⁵

With the rise of MTV in the early 1980s, record labels began shifting their focus toward music videos and other media verticals, reducing their reliance on outdoor advertising in the process. The musical billboards that once dominated the Strip began to disappear—a change visible in Ruscha’s documentation as well. By the time of his 1985 visit, immersive signs promoting musicians or live acts had largely vanished. A few reappear in later years, often tied to specific venues like the Key Club (9039 Sunset Boulevard, 2007), although these signs have become smaller, quieter, and less central than they once were. One exception to this gradual disappearance of nightlife advertising on the Strip is the large marquee sign (see 8433 Sunset Boulevard, 2007). With a marquee, prefab letters could be swapped out as needed to reflect the performance du jour. In the pre-digital era, this was a convenient alternative to costly custom signage—offering scale and visibility without the need for constant reprinting or repainting. This was evident, for example, at 9009 Sunset Boulevard, which was a burlesque club in 1966 and eventually the Roxy. The format has nonetheless endured well beyond its original utility. Despite technological advancements, marquee signs remained common through the 1980s (as at 6720 Sunset Boulevard) and beyond, not just for their flexibility, but also for their visual presence. They evoke a sense of timeless performance, situating a venue like the Laugh Factory, at 8001 Sunset Boulevard (2007), or Amoeba Music, at 6410 Sunset Boulevard (2007), as continuations of the ongoing cultural lineage of rock clubs, movie theaters, and mid-century nightlife in the area.

Electric Desire

Beyond billboards, Ruscha’s archive also makes visible a second defining signage element in LA: neon. As Kevin Starr wrote in 1999, “If Paris is the City of Lights, LA is the City of Neon.”⁶ Like the proliferation of billboards, the rise of neon in Los Angeles was shaped by the city’s geography and planning constraints. Until the 1950s, buildings in downtown LA were capped at twelve stories, creating a low-rise skyline.⁷ In order to distinguish themselves in this flattened hierarchy, businesses were forced to compete laterally instead. Double-sided neon signs facing traffic, as at 801 Sunset Boulevard, became an effective solution and part of a visual arms race. Each structure tried to outshine its neighbor, transforming Los Angeles into an illuminated cacophony. The impact of these neon signs on the city was twofold. On the surface, they brought a visual spectacle to the urban environment, creating a sense of excitement and wonder. On a more profound level, they became a shorthand for the modernity and abundance of postwar America—the promise of something worth pulling over for.

Neon was introduced to the United States from France in 1923—in fact, that first appearance was at a car dealership in Los Angeles.⁸ Businesses quickly recognized the attention-grabbing qualities of the technology.⁹ Over the following decades, neon signs spread across a diverse set of commercial facades, a phenomenon readily apparent on Sunset Boulevard. Beauty parlors (6687 Sunset Boulevard, 1973), loan servicers (6501 Sunset Boulevard, 1973), used car lots (7575 Sunset Boulevard, 1973), motels (6757 Sunset Boulevard, 1985), and gas stations (8539 Sunset Boulevard, 1966) all contributed to the lively and electric atmosphere of the city. While Ruscha’s black-and-white, daytime photography cannot fully capture the ecstatic glow of these signs at night, traces of neon’s presence still register. You can see the glass tubes lining the interiors of cursive script, as at 5138 Sunset Boulevard (1973), and curved sans serifs, as at 6098 Sunset Boulevard (1973), throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Nightlife was one of Los Angeles’s most visible exports, and its signage had to keep pace, performing around the clock. Neon fit the bill handily. In the heyday of neon, visible in Ruscha’s 1973 photos, clubs (6507 Sunset Boulevard), theaters (7425 Sunset Boulevard), and restaurants (8017 Sunset Boulevard) relied on illuminated signs not just for visibility, but also for atmosphere. Neon provided the technical means to operate after dark, and also matched the tone of the experience being sold: one of leisure, indulgence, intimacy, and escape. A glowing facade was both an invitation and a promise that what happened inside was as vibrant as what you saw on the outside. In mid-century Los Angeles, neon stood at the intersection of commercial innovation and aesthetic futurism. As businesses competed for attention in a rapidly expanding, car-centric city, neon became the visual language of the future—bright, kinetic, and impossible to ignore. It was a perfect match for California, a state long associated with forward thinking (as the New York Times put it in a 2023 retrospective on the state’s cultural influence, “If you want to know the future, the saying goes, look to California”).¹⁰ From aerospace to amusement parks, the state projected an image of technological optimism and lifestyle innovation. Neon easily became part of that projection: glowing proof that modernity had arrived.

Unfortunately, that glow was expensive. Neon relies on fragile glass tubing, rare gases, and skilled labor, making it both expensive to produce and costly to maintain. For decades, those demands were tolerated because there were few alternatives. But as new technologies emerged—cheaper, brighter, easier to install—businesses began to move on. Once neon’s visual impact could be approximated for less, its complexity became a liability. Ruscha’s photographs quietly register this shift. Some neon signs endured over decades (5916 Sunset Boulevard), presumably maintained by the few remaining expert craftsmen; but overall the format gave way to more disposable ones: fluorescent boxes (8533 Sunset Boulevard, 2007), LCD screens (8017 Sunset Boulevard, 1995), and internally illuminated channel lettering (7561 Sunset Boulevard, 2007). As seen in 2007, some neon signs survived only in fragments: a sign pocked with tube holes but missing its glass at 7500 Sunset Boulevard, or a hollow frame retrofitted with new text at 5211 Sunset Boulevard, the neon long gone. The visual ambition that once defined the Strip had dimmed, one tube at a time.

This shift in rarity created a peculiar shift in meaning, however. In Ruscha’s later photographs, the same glow that once marked a new opening and the buzz of progress instead signaled the exact opposite: the legacy and nostalgia (as at 8585 Sunset Boulevard, 2007) of the good old days, when Sunset was packed with cocktail lounges and glamorous hotels, not mini-malls and parking garages (7023 Sunset Boulevard). On Sunset, these signs became a kind of accidental archive, evidence of an era when signage aspired to dazzle, and dazzling entertainment was plentiful. Neon’s eccentricity became its strength again, helping businesses stand out or borrow credibility from an often imagined past. After all, no two neon signs—each shaped by a different artisan—look exactly alike, while two LCD screens rarely differ beyond their text style.

Seen in 2007, an old neon sign established personality. It also meant a business had been around a while. Just take the Chateau Marmont (8221 Sunset Boulevard) and its famous neon signs, which persist in Ruscha’s photographs from 1966 to 2007 and remain today. Decisive action by historic preservationists who recognized the value of neon to the Angeleno urban character has bolstered the protection of remaining examples, and has kept those signs present on the Strip.¹¹ As this resurgence in care broadens, one wonders what Ruscha’s camera would capture now and whether the neon that flickered through his lens might once again be on the rise.

Typographic Signals

To discuss signage without discussing typography is to ignore the very material of its expression. Letterforms are what make a sign legible—not just in function, but also in feeling. And just like the formats and technologies on which they appear, typographic styles are shaped by tools, methods, and taste. A sign’s typography doesn’t just tell you what a place is or what services it provides: it tells you how to feel about it.

Before splashier plastic and metal formats became affordable, many small businesses on Sunset relied on hand-painted signage. While no two sign painters were exactly alike, the forms they produced shared certain conventions. Sign painting was traditionally taught through apprenticeship, a system that helped carry certain letterforms and stylistic patterns across decades. Many of these forms were further standardized through instruction manuals, which, in 1966, meant signs often featured similar styles of italicized “casual” letters (8853 Sunset Boulevard), blocky “uprights” (8373 Sunset Boulevard), stylized drop shadows, or cursive scripts (9105 Sunset Boulevard).¹² Their forms weren’t driven by aesthetic intention so much as mechanics: the angle of the brush, the width of the stroke, and the need to work quickly and economically to conserve paint, effort, and time under the heat of the sun.

Sign painting offered a practical, affordable alternative to the more glamorous signage formats that defined the Strip. For smaller businesses, especially those offering services rather than experiences, hand-painted text on cardstock, metal, or glass was cheaper than neon, faster than fabricated lettering, and more legible at scale than anything a typewriter (the only DIY mode of text production for the layman at the time) could provide. While splashier signs advertised nightlife and fantasy, hand-painted lettering often marked more utilitarian spaces, such as accounting offices, discount stationery (7272 Sunset Boulevard, 1985), and notaries (8497 Sunset Boulevard, 1973). It was also the format of choice for temporary or disposable messaging, like “Office Space Available” notices (8733 Sunset Boulevard, 1966), lease signs (8496 Sunset Boulevard, 1973), or weekly specials (8874 Sunset Boulevard, 1985) back when digital printers and quick-copy shops were still rare. Sign painting could also have its moments of spectacle: when scaled across entire facades, as in 7551 Sunset Boulevard’s “Antiques” or 7575 Sunset Boulevard’s “USED CARS” (both visible in 1973), it could match the immersive effect of a billboard, transforming a building’s wall into a message in its own right.

Other sign technologies came with different constraints and introduced entirely new looks. Routed lettering, cut from wood or metal with mechanical tools, necessitated rounded corners and avoided fine detail, resulting in smooth shapes and mono-width forms. Neon, shaped from hand-bent glass tubes, required space to accommodate long, continuous lines (8849 Sunset Boulevard, 1966) of fragile material. This often meant looped scripts (8017 Sunset Boulevard, 1966) or blocky sans serifs (7160 Sunset Boulevard, 1973), whose proportions allowed the mounted tubes’ glow to sit within the visual bounds of the letters. Painted stencils (8600 Sunset Boulevard, 1985) necessitated non-enclosed counterforms (8420 Sunset Boulevard, 1985) that wouldn’t "drop out" out of the stencil. Vacuum-formed plastics (7912 Sunset Boulevard, 1985) required bold, rounded shapes, as dictated by the limits of mold-making. Each material introduced its own logic of legibility, durability, and speed. And as fabrication options multiplied, so did the palette of available styles. Scale played a role as well: small-format signs demanded tight spacing, generous counters, and thick strokes to read at a distance, while larger signs could afford more personality—including extended widths, high contrast, and decorative flourishes. As fabrication options multiplied, the typographic palette expanded accordingly, and Ruscha’s camera recorded these changes.

The typographic history of Sunset is, in many ways, a microcosm of American graphic design in the second half of the twentieth century. Early signage, especially in Ruscha’s 1966 photographs, often reflected the modernist ideals of the first part of the mid-century: Bauhaus- and Swiss-influenced sans serifs (8351 Sunset Boulevard), balanced spacing (9041 Sunset Boulevard), and little to no decoration (9021 Sunset Boulevard). These signs prioritized clarity and order, echoing the rise of the corporate identity systems and postwar design manuals that were reshaping American visual culture in the postwar era. That trend was evident also in the streamlined Shell Gas logo, redesigned just five years earlier, that is captured in Ruscha’s 1966 photograph of 8873 Sunset Boulevard. In such examples, typography was treated as a neutral vessel: objective, legible, and efficient.

By 1973, signage began to adopt a more expressive visual language. Lettering moved beyond the neutral modernism of earlier decades toward more evocative forms: eclectic curves (7509 Sunset Boulevard), bubble letters (7523 Sunset Boulevard), and art nouveau styles (8371 Sunset Boulevard). Some signs in the late 1950s and early 1960s had already flirted with flair—through fussy scripts (9039 Sunset Boulevard) or Las Vegas-inspired “swinging sixties” forms (8851 Sunset Boulevard)—but by the 1970s, that decorative impulse had gotten louder, weirder, and more culturally specific. Type began to channel the psychedelic aesthetics of the moment, embracing exaggerated forms and layered visual cues. That expressiveness wasn’t always subtle: stylization often veered into stereotype, with faux-ethnic scripts deployed as shorthand for themed experiences. By 1973, the Seventh Veil, at 7180 Sunset Boulevard, used faux Arabic to suggest mystery and sensuality in advertising its “belly dancers”; likewise, The Chopsticks, a Chinese restaurant at 7224 Sunset Boulevard, relied on the infamous “Chop Suey” typeface, a caricatured style long used to cue “Asian” to Western audiences.¹³

Even when tone wasn’t precisely targeted, it was no longer neutral. Trippy sale signs (8519 Sunset Boulevard, 1973) or arcade-themed facades (8645 Sunset Boulevard, 1973) may not have been specific to businesses’ identities, but they did convey attitude. Signage had gone from generically clean to generically groovy. Keeping up with current styles signaled competitiveness. A refreshed sign suggested a refreshed business. Typography was one of the clearest ways to renew relevance.

In Ruscha’s 1985 photographs, the evolving relationship between typography and identity on the boulevard comes into sharper focus. Typography had begun to operate less as a label and more as a tool for projection, used to attract attention as well as to curate a point of view. Here, a clothing store like Warp, at 4017 Sunset Boulevard, leans into jagged, angular letterforms that feel confrontational and cool, a coded message for a fashion-forward, countercultural audience. Down the road, Plunket Keys, at 8373 Sunset Boulevard, opts for a very different message: gleaming chrome letterforms in a Deco-revival style, conjuring a sense of affluence and aspirational luxury. These decisions reflect a deeper shift in how businesses positioned themselves. Stores were no longer simply selling products; they were curated experiences with a defined tone and a brand "world." Typography, like naming, became a way to suggest how a customer might feel walking through the door—ironic, rebellious, exclusive, stylish. Signage was a tool for self-definition, shaping not only how a business looked, but also how it wanted to be understood.

By the 1990s and 2000s, the visual language of Sunset recorded a broader cultural shift: the rise of branding as a framework not just for mass-market products but also for nearly every business, at every scale. Where “brand” once referred to the identity systems of multinational corporations, it had by this point trickled down to boutiques, salons, tech repair shops—businesses with a single location projecting themselves with the polish and consistency of global chains. Ruscha’s later photographs show this evolution in action. For example, by 2007 Liquor Locker (8157 Sunset Boulevard) had replaced the metal inset-lit sign visible in 1985—a format once shared across businesses—with a custom red awning set in a minimalist sans serif, now complete with a proprietary “LL” monogram. Elsewhere, shops introduced iconography alongside their lettering or displayed third-party brand marks, like the Nike Swoosh (8420 Sunset Boulevard, 1985), to position themselves as glossy, tech-forward, and aligned with something larger.

These visual cues—monograms, gridded layouts, icon-and-wordmark lockups—point to the rise of the “brand kit,” a visual system optimized for replication and legibility across platforms. Ruscha’s 2007 photos show even single-location storefronts, like 7509, 7511, and 7513 Sunset Boulevard, taking this approach, using typography and composition to craft tone and personality. At the same time, many of the small businesses that once defined the street were simply gone by then. Across just a few blocks and in just over a decade, Rite Aid had replaced Buckbuster (6730 Sunset Boulevard) and Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse had replaced a business called “VDI” (6920 Sunset Boulevard). As branding became more codified, it reshaped who could afford to participate. The more polished the design, the more polished the business behind it was expected to be. Sunset saw fewer mom-and-pop shops and more chain storefronts performing legitimacy through visual systems alone.

Across Ruscha’s archive, then, signage emerges not only as a record of commercial intent, but also as an index fossil of shifting cultural conditions. Signage has never been just surface. The signs of Sunset Boulevard trace changes in taste, ambition, and the tools available to express them. Increasingly during Ruscha’s visits, signs pointed toward a future of visual consolidation. By 2007, the idiosyncrasy of earlier decades had given way to polish, and with it, a quieter kind of uniformity. Signage, on Sunset and elsewhere, will inevitably continue to act as a proxy for relevance, reflecting the aesthetics, priorities, and technologies of the moment, along with whatever future we’re being sold. But what that signage has to say next is still unclear.

Maybe nothing captures the evolution of signage on Sunset more clearly than this: by 2007, one of the only sign shops left on the street in 1995, at 5900 Sunset Boulevard, had become a cheap gift store. Even the signmakers have moved on.

Notes