Cliffs of Id is a new climbing gym from Touchstone Climbing opening in Culver City, California. It is named after a passage in Reyner Banham’s Four Ecologies of Los Angeles, a book about Southern California and its architecture: “The Plains of Id are where the crudest urban lusts and most fundamental aspirations are created, manipulated and, with luck, satisfied.”
The Cliffs of Id symbol is a winged robot, an encapsulation of the mythic future as promised to America by the movie and television industries of Southern California in the 1950’s and 60’s. Like most of our trademark work, we inked this symbol by hand prior to rebuilding it in Illustrator. The wordmark is set in a 17 Oblong, an architectural typeface by Dutch designers René Knip and Janno Hahn at Arktype.