Panel Van Aesthetics

EDIT 08/08/11: Here are some 1980s Font pages that people are searching for and landing on this page:

1. A large number of cool fonts here, I like the computer games fonts, here.
2. Commodore 64 font, here.
3. A Tron font, here.
4. Da Font has heaps of cool fonts, I like the ‘Techno sci-fi’ fonts, here.
5. A ‘neon 80s’ font, here.

I went back to the department store and bought another exercise top. Besides the neo-colonial tourism thing they’ve got going on, they remind me of the murals that were painted on the side of panel vans in the 1970s. This one especially:

This is like a weird childhood refrain. The stenciled palm trees and airbrush-like bicolour sky and chunky neon-ish font is straight out of the early-80s. The panel vans of this era, just before Street Machining took over in a big way, all had phallocentric names like ‘Alley Cat’, ‘Dream Warrior’, ‘Checkmate’, ‘Seducer’, ‘Invader 2001’, ‘Motivator’, and ‘Total Eclipse’. ‘Tropical Nights’ could very well have been a panel van. I bought another different one ‘Paradise’ but I am wearing it.

I have also gone Fight Club-crazy with the Ikea-ification of my flat. Well kind of, I did get two 6 ft by 3ft shelves off eBay to hold all my books. However the second panel van aesthetics point of this blog post is that I did get some Ikea shelves and some cardboard magazine holder things which fit sungly into the shelves. So now my several hundred magazines are off the floor. I have shifted the TV into the bedroom and couch against the wall height windows. There is heaps more room but the problem is that now I have this massive white wall of magazine holders where my porn-set-style mirror wall used to be. Not that I am too sad about the loss of my mirror wall, rather I see the white wall (black hole! lol!) as an opportunity to do something. I think it would be cool to use the cover art as pop art. So I have decided to scan a cover of one of the 1970s panel van magazine covers and blow it up so each magazine holder has a little slice of the cover. It will be a 6 ft high magazine cover or 2/3’s of a cover. Some of the covers in the 1970s were completely crazy, especially from Van Wheels magazine. I like the bottom one, issue 3:

When I can afford the ink for my colour printer I’ll do it and post some photos.