Two Signs for S.o.u.r, a Bar off Sofiyivska Square
The bar’s name is an acronym, and the terrace sign is built on it: four script letters read as “Sour” and start four words at the same time — Sunset Over Urban Resort.
S.o.u.r opened on 16 September on Mykhailivskyi Lane, a few minutes’ walk from Sofiyivska Square. The name is an acronym: Sunset Over Urban Resort. The terrace sign is built on it.
Four script letters stand in a column down the left, and each one starts its own word: S for UNSET, o for VER, u for RBAN, r for ESORT. One letter does two jobs. In production that means an unforgiving grid: the height of a script character sets the height of the printed line opposite it, and a few millimetres of drift breaks the link the whole sign was designed around.
The backing is clear, and that is where the work went. You see the shrubs through the acrylic — which means you also see everything mounted behind it. On an opaque panel the face itself hides the power feed, the jumpers and the fixings; here there is nowhere to hide them, so the routing has to be settled on the drawing rather than on site.
The second sign stands at the entrance. It is a pylon: a green portal, a diamond carried forward in a pink outline, an eight-point star above it and “Sour” in script inside. It is read from a different distance — from the lane, from the far side of the street — so it works as a silhouette: the diamond and the star register well before a single letter can be made out.
Two signs for one venue are almost never made alike. A guest in the garden is already inside and looking from close up, which is where the trick with the first letters lands. Someone out in the lane does not yet know whether this is their place, and what they need is a shape.
Services in this project