TradeNames: Taylor Signs does a good line in neon halos for statues of Our Lady. And between 1935 and now, it has made signs for everyone from Guinness and Hafner's Sausages to the West Coast Coffee Company. Rose Doyle reports.

Taylor Signs on Bluebell Road in Dublin 12 is one of the more visually obvious of the city's older companies. Its work is an everyday part of our lives, writ in the neon signs we see and pass daily, landmarks some of them.

They do an especially good line in neon halos for statues of the Virgin Mary.

Taylors was the company which made the early Fly Aer Lingus (with neon wing) sign, the Mass X-Ray sign at the bottom of a blown-up Nelson's Pillar, the vertical letters sign for Hafner's sausages. In today's Ireland Taylors puts the illuminated shine into signs for all sorts of outfits, from banks to insurance companies to Easons, OPEL, SAAB, McDonalds, O'Briens Sandwich Bars, the West Coast Coffee Company.

Joe Taylor, son of Fred, is the man running things these days. Fred set up the company in 1932 and officially registered it as a sign business in 1935.

But the company story properly begins in Fred Taylor's childhood and family, which is where Joe Taylor begins the telling. He's a benign man, relaxed in his role in the family firm he joined as a salesman, in l978, not long before his father retired.

"My father's family lived on Harcourt Road," he says, "opposite the old railway station. They were a big family, 13 children in all. My grandfather was a cabinet maker. He bought the Brittan Car factory in Portobello, Grove Road, in the 1920s and had a factory there making the equivalent of today's fitted kitchens."

Five of the Taylor sons left for the US "to see what was what" according to Joe. Joseph (the eldest) went in the 1920s and was followed by Tom, Bill, Jim and Fred Jr (father of today's MD, Joe Taylor) in the 1930s. "They were progressive fellows," Joe says, "and looked into neon and sign making.

Ultimately, by the end of the 1940s, Tom, Bill, Jim and Fred were running the business in Portobello. They kept things ticking over during the war years, starting by developing neon tubing. Gaelite signs were doing the same thing at the same time. After the war things were very depressed and they diversified into making such things as shoes and pencil boxes as well to keep ticking over.

The company has a way of keeping things within the family: one of Jim Taylor's two daughters married a Taylor employee, accountant John Armstrong, who is Joe Taylor's partner and joint MD in the business today . Of Fred Taylor's four children Joe, by his own admission, is one who "went seriously into the business. Stephen was briefly involved but my sisters Barbara and Pamela decided against it".

Eamonn Conlon, the company's estimator and one time works manager, is 44 years with Taylor Signs. Sign making is a "crafty business", he says, "with lots of characters in it".

In the early days, he says, "we'd an ancient way of doing things. There was no sheet metal available to make signs so pre-war, they used get car doors and beat them flat and cut the metal from that and paint on it. You had to ad lib a bit . . ." This ad libbing included producing more than signs during and just after the war. "The company made toys, even U-boats, and brush handles and clogs. They had to make whatever they could to keep going."

He talks about "pioneering work" on the part of Taylor Signs. Neon tubing, basically, involves blowing glass tubes into shape. The early Taylor Signs glass blowers were Czech, some of whom had come to work for Waterford Glass. "We'd a very active glass blowing shop," he says, "and when very busy we'd get special glass people from Czechoslovakia, Italy and Canada. Some who came stayed on because that's what it was like then. Jobs weren't easy to get and when you got one you held onto it."

Taylor Signs "rode the various depressions through the years", he says, "fair dues to them. Fred Taylor MD was a very stoic kind of man and he ran a very tight ship. He was looked up to and very good at what he did; he was upright and rigid in his manner and the air changed when he arrived in the morning, a shock went through it!

"The work standards of the time were high, no one tried anything on. Plus we made our own transformers to operate neon tubes, even exporting them. Jim Brennan was in charge of that."

He falls to remembering others who worked for Taylor Signs over the years. Men like George Watson, Martin Murray, Jimmy Green, Joe Murphy and Brendan McGill (the latter still with the company). Long termers in the plastic shop were Joe Ryan and Bill Power. Joe Fox was a painter and general manager and Paddy Dignam and Pearse Butler were glass men.

"Following Fred we got Joe," Eamonn Conlon grins, "this is a different time zone and his style is more fluid." He laughs. "You have to be, these days."

The 1960s were tough, he admits. "Everyone rode bikes; there weren't so many cars then. We had little signs in little towns all over the country. Simpler signs; there wasn't a lot of money used then for advertising. There weren't so many financial institutions either, nor an IT sector. It really was village Ireland, small and very local for the most part, the pace of life slow in comparison with today."

Signs were made from initial sketches, developed into a full-size drawing. "We'd a studio of people. All drawings had to be copied by hand. Now we have artwork on a disc and just bring it up. We'd a drawing office then, with people like George Sturdy, Christy O'Leary, fine draughtstmen."

He remembers some signs: "The Capital Cinema was a beautiful sign, and the Guinness sign on Bachelor's Walk." Joe Taylor talks then about changing fashions, about how signs "don't last half so long now. People are very conscious of brand and image and will change every few years.

"Neon has faded out; the planners have a lot to do with it. We don't have a Piccadilly Circus area in Dublin, more's the pity. The planners have never taken advice about signs in the past. If you say you want neon they go ballistic but if you want illuminated this seems to be okay, even though they're the same thing! They're all neon lit."

There were 40 employed by Taylor Signs when he joined, now there are 30 plus those taken on on sub-contracts - "when we're under pressure and we're always under pressure! Things always have to be done for the next day, that's the way it goes."

The trend, he says, is "towards LED, light emitting diode" which involves the use of tiny bulbs on low voltage and is relatively maintenance free. Signs have become simpler and smaller.

"Light engineering is more mass produced because everything is made to size. A lot of major companies buy abroad and bring signs in, from big corporations who've multi-branches across Europe have them centrally distributed.

"You just have to accept it's happening. In the old days we'd eight artists employed, now we've only one, Trevor Hewson. It's actually very expensive to manufacture here and costs are high for insurance and labour because you want the right people. Health and safety restrictions have gone over the top too - no one uses their head to work out solutions.

"There's no real turnover of staff in the sign business, variety keeps them involved, every day is different. Sites dictate the work of the day and no one is office bound. We'll go on," he laughs, "for the moment."