Plaza Verde shopping center signs
One of the signs as captured by Google Street View in October 2018
Plaza Verde is a shopping center on Illinois Route 68 in Arlington Heights, a municipality in Cook County and a suburb of Chicago. The yellow signs with the name use Yagi Universal.
This monolinear geometric sans is part of the Yagi series, designed by Teruoki Yagi in 1968 and made available in nine styles as part of Robert Trogman’s Facsimilie Fonts library for FotoStar. Not as popular as the inline faces Yagi Double and Yagi Link Double, Yagi Universal is the only family member to include a lowercase. It was made in three numbered styles, with a boatload of alternates. Nos. 2 and 3 aren’t different from No. 1 in weight, but are better described as revisions of the same theme.
The signs are based on the No. 2, which appears to be the only style to include the E with the full-round back. Several other alternates were employed to join up letters. The strokes were made heavier, leading to smaller counters. In P and D, the counters were cut open at the bottom left. As a finishing touch, the initial and final letterforms in both words were extended.
I don’t know when the signs were made. Chances are they go back all the way to the 1980s, or even beyond. Yagi Universal disappeared with the demise of phototype in the 1990s. Claude Pelletier made a digitization in 2012, but the signs definitely are older than that: the earliest capture by Google Street View is from October 2007, the year when the technology was launched. If you know when the shopping center was opened, I’m happy to hear it!
The Plaza Verde sign (left) compared to a resetting in YagiUhfNo2, Claude Pelletier’s faithful digitization of Yagi Universal No. 2, with tightened spacing and alternates for P A E R D (right).
A sign at a different building, captured by Google Street View in September 2015
A close-up taken by Kent Henderson in 2023
