Maloney Concrete Sign Design

At the Maloney Concrete plant in Bethesda, MD there was an iconic lettered sign up high on both sides of the main tower of the plant. The beautiful Art Deco lettering was painted red at one point and really stood out  among all the industrial machinery that surrounded it.

Maloney Concrete, early 1980s. M. Vurek photo.
The Maloney plant, with the deco lettering painted red. Photo by M. Vurek, early 1980s.

I plan on modeling one face of this concrete loading hopper and as such need to include the gorgeous sign. Unfortunately the font is different than anything I have. The font “Broadway” is a close match but has significant differences. I contacted a friend who also confirmed my suspicions about its design and decided to draw it myself using Adobe Illustrator. The process was not too bad as most of the letters are geometric and consistent. Thankfully there’s some repetition, too.

Maloney Concrete sign drawing
my re-drawing of the Maloney Concrete sign in Bethesda, MD

My plan is to laser engrave this onto a piece of very thin wood which I will then paint and install in the model, eventually. This is a first draft, so comments are welcome!

2 thoughts on “Maloney Concrete Sign Design

  1. Have you managed to construct the sign yet? The drawing looks spot on to me, the only thing is the letters look to be perhaps just a tad thicker than the sign in the photo?

  2. Not yet! Thanks for reminding me. I do need to take a stab at it. I may revise the weights for some of the letters. The font is really weird to work with. It’s not all consistent, from what I can tell, but then again, I’m going off old, third-hand photos. I suspect this was hand made at a sign shop or something similar thus the inconsistencies.

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