Restoring The 1950's Ames "Building Blocks" Logo

[108CAM]

In this thread, I'm going to explain how I restored and colourised the 1950's Ames "Building Blocks" logo.


Being my favourite Ames logo, I really wanted to see a high quality colour image of this logo for quite some time and thought I'd use my knowledge in image restoration to bring this logo back to its former glory.

For many years, this blurry black and white photo of the old St. Johnsbury, VT store sign was the only image that I knew of that contained the 1950's Ames "Building Blocks" logo.

The quality of this image is far too low for me to be able to easily restore the logo so I knew a higher quality image was needed if I was to restore the logo.

Fast forward to 2023 and I stumble upon a thread about the Ames sign at the St. Johnsbury, VT location.
The thread contained this screenshot from Google Street View which shows the sign falling apart.


For the first time in probably 50 years, the colour scheme of the Ames Building Blocks logo was revealed!
This was a huge breakthrough with my goal to restore the logo but I was still faced with one issue, I didn't have an image of high enough quality to use as a template for redrawing the logo.

A few days after finding the thread for the St. Johnsbury sign, I decided to Google "Ames Worsted Textile Co" to see if it would bring up some older Ames related items and when scrolling through the plethora of images and photos, I found a digital scan of an Ames payslip from the 1950's, complete with the Building Blocks logo in high enough quality that I could use it as a template to redraw the logo.


With the Street View image as a colour reference and the payslip as my template, I finally had everything required for restoring and colourising the logo.

Next step was the restoration itself. Block by block, letter by letter, the logo is redrawn, colourised and restored to its former glory.


After a few touch ups and finding the most suitable shade of red for the background, the restoration is complete. I'm very proud of how it looks and hope that everyone enjoys seeing this logo in colour and high quality.