Sun-Faded Letters & Gold Leaf Dreams: A Love Letter to Vintage Signage

Words from someone who remembers when things were built to last.

I grew up just outside Johannesburg in a dusty little town that never made it onto any tourist map, and that’s exactly how we liked it. It was the kind of place where time moved slowly. Mornings started with the sound of dogs barking down the road, afternoons were spent carving up makeshift skate ramps under the local water tower, and weekends meant hanging outside the corner shop or petrol station, sipping on a coke that had gone warm and talking trash with whoever was around. There were no phones. No screens. Just skateboards, cracked pavement, and sun-faded signs telling us what the world had to offer.

I think that’s where my love of old signage began. It wasn’t just advertising, it was part of the architecture of the town. You didn’t just read a sign, you felt it.

There was the butcher with a hand-painted bull’s head fading into the red brick wall, the barber shops window sign in gold leaf with letters that someone must’ve traced with a trembling brush decades ago, and the vacuum-formed Coke sign outside the bottle store which was dented, weathered, and flicking with the sounds of a worn out fluro starter.

I remember running my hands over the raised plastic letters, chipped from too many sunburnt summers, and thinking someone made this. Not in a factory with robots. With hands. With tools. With time. Maybe in a little workshop behind the shop. Maybe by someone with a radio humming and a cup of tea gone cold.

Those signs are disappearing now, just like the old boys who welded the brackets and mixed the paints. The shops they hung on are gone too.  Replaced by grey render, vinyl stickers, and LED boards that flicker and die like forgotten ideas.

But I still believe there’s a place for that kind of craftsmanship- especially now.

In a world of digital everything, A chunky physical sign you can reach out and touch made of laser-cut steel with rivets and weight to it? That’s not branding...that’s character. It says someone gave a damn.

At Pretty Polly, we try to carry a bit of that spirit into everything we make. Even if it’s done with modern tools, it’s never without old-school pride. We want our signs to feel like they’ve been there forever...or better yet, like they’ll still be there long after the batteries in your iPhone give out.

Because at the end of the day, a good sign doesn’t just tell you where you are.

It tells you the store owner that ordered it still has a love for the craft of other artisans in his community,