When the now 88-year-old Betty Willis came up with the design for Las Vegas' iconic "Welcome" sign, it was almost by accident, but even so, she knew she wanted it to be special. As the ever-candid graphic desinger revealed in an interview back in 2005:
"That sign was the result of an all-night bull session in which one of the first drawings was retrieved from the wastebasket. Everything you could flash or spin, we did it. We thought the city was fabulous, so we added the word."
As she recalled in an earlier interview, back in 2002, "I wanted to create something that people would remember, so I tipped the square on its side and curved the ends. The lettering and everything about the sign went against the designs of that time."
No bells or whistles were to be spared, so the silver Roosevelt "dollars" were added behind the letters that spell out "WELCOME" as a nod to Nevada's status as the Silver State. "We knew the sign would be recognizable because of the odd shape. We wanted people to remember the town and come back. The circles were expensive. So we put in a lot of them," explained Willis to the New York Times.
Apparently, it still irks the ever-feisty designer that the hand-drawn lettering of the word "fabulous" looks amateurish to her. "I sweat blood when I take a good hard look at it," she says.
The sign was sold to Clark County for $4,000 and erected in 1959, but the design was never copyrighted, since Willis felt the city needed as much free publicity as it could get. "When a logo is successful, people remember it. It's a pretty good job that sign has done." The only time we're aware of its designer, who now lives on Social Security, earning a dime in later years from her much-reproduced creation was in 2008, when she hosted an autograph session signing prints of the sign photographed at night.
Images appear courtesy of Las Vegas News Bureau and Las Vegas Review-Journal.
