These are all drawn from real life. Growing up we had a neighbor who had scrawled “NO DOG MESS” in giant letters on their own fence, which we all thought was uglier than any dog poop that might have been left in front of his house.

I had the idea of ‘pre cell phone pocket trumpeted’. Wasn’t sure exactly what that meant; played around with bugles, etc. But I thought the Lord of the Rings type horn worked. As far as the visual style, I was inspired by the book “Mid-Century Modern Graphic Design” by Theo Inglish, and particularly the works of Tom Eckersley and Harry Stevens. I tried to make a deliberately flat look.

At some point I learned about ligatures in typography, where adjacent letters change to avoid crowding (e.g. an “f” next to an “i” will often change so the dot of the i isn’t uncomfortably close to the right hand loop of the f). Coupled with extensive old Law & Order / crime shows and their use of ligature, plus the use of chalk outlines for dead bodies, led to this unfortunate mashup.