Sparky Potter isn’t a name you’re likely to see in lights. That’s more the purview of his celebrity daughter, singer-songwriter Grace Potter. But in his field, Sparky is a rock star in his own right. Anyone who has spent time in Vermont has undoubtedly seen his artistic creations without even knowing it. For more than 50 years, the ski bum turned Waitsfield sign maker has been drawing attention to the names of others, helping them become recognized Vermont institutions.
Potter, 76, is a self-taught woodworker, designer, photographer and typography expert. He didn’t come up with the original Ben & Jerry’s sign, but he was the one who put a three-dimensional ice cream cone on it, made it “Alice in Wonderland size,” he said, and got it into scoop shops across North America. He also created the Ben & Jerry’s factory signage in Waterbury, including the tombstones for its Flavor Graveyard.
Similarly, Potter was behind the 3D bagel signs at Bruegger’s Bagels, which over the years have adorned more than 350 franchises nationwide. And in the early 1980s, when few had heard of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Potter designed the company’s coffee bean sign that helped make its products an essential part of many people’s morning routine.
Vermont became the first state in the country to ban billboards, in 1968, in an effort to protect its natural beauty from visual clutter. The law helped promote what is now a $4 billion tourism industry, but initially it posed a huge challenge for businesses to make their presence and identities known. When Potter founded Wood & Wood Signs in 1972, the company’s creations gave visitors their first, and often lasting, impression of many local establishments.
Over the years, Wood & Wood has produced some of the most iconic graphics on Vermont’s landscape. Potter made the cuddly plush toy sign that welcomes visitors to Vermont Teddy Bear, the green leaf sign that encapsulates the values of Seventh Generation and the chocolate bar sign that beckons lovers of sweets into Lake Champlain Chocolates.
Potter’s signs welcome and direct skiers and snowboarders at Sugarbush, Stowe, Jay Peak, Killington and Mount Snow resorts and guide paddlers along the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. And when local TV news crews report from Vermont State Police headquarters in Waterbury, they invariably stand in front of Potter’s sign.
“His designs really evoke a sense of place … They serve as a visual extension of Vermont’s identity.” Richard Doubleday
His reach extends far beyond Vermont, from the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in New York City to Universal Studios theme park in Orlando, Fla., to ski resorts and trail systems in the Rocky Mountains. Wood & Wood signs adorn hospitals, museums and music festivals and were seen on international television during the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.
Now, after a half-century banner career, Potter has stepped back from the day-to-day operations of his business — not to fully retire, but to spend more time with his wife, Peggy, 74, and their three children and grandchildren. In March, Wood & Wood announced the sale of the company to Erik Joslin, an employee of 25 years, and his wife, Cheryl, a transition that was two years in the making.
Despite the new leadership, no one expects dramatic alterations. “People can tell when they look at it that it’s a Wood & Wood sign,” said Joslin, 50. “I’m not gonna change that.”
Minimalist yet bold, occasionally whimsical and other times classically traditional, Potter’s handmade signs often become synonymous with the entities they represent.
“His designs really evoke a sense of place,” said Richard Doubleday, a visiting professor of graphic design at Champlain College. “They’re not just functional markers. They serve as a visual extension of Vermont’s identity.”
And as an extension of Potter’s own persona. Smiley and good-natured, with owl-eye glasses and a mop of silver hair, he exudes an effervescence and creative passion that reflects his work-hard, play-hard ethos. Known for eating his morning bowl of cereal standing up to get on the go faster, Potter still plays ice hockey twice a week, bikes hundreds of miles each year, and regularly catches the first chair at Sugarbush or Mad River Glen before returning to his shop for a different kind of carving.
“Designing is like dreaming while you’re awake.” Sparky Potter
Potter also dives deep into the research for his sign making and will spend hours, usually late at night, studying illustrated books of calligraphy, typography, art history and architecture. His work combines traditional designs with modern tastes and styles, always with an eye on the history and vernacular of the particular region where he’s working. Central to all of Potter’s projects is a philosophy of collaboration and shared creative vision.
“Designing is like dreaming while you’re awake,” he often says. “It’s one of the most delightful things humans can do together.”
Ski Bums and Barn Boards
While Wood & Wood’s roots run deep in the Mad River Valley, Potter is a transplant to Vermont. Born Richard Potter, the second of three boys, he grew up in Wethersfield, Conn., where his mother served for years as deputy mayor and his father, an engineer by training, worked as an insurance agent. Though neither parent worked in artistic professions, Potter said, he had one grandmother who stenciled art on metal and another who was a seamstress for the musical duo Dale Evans and Roy Rogers.
Potter started drawing at age 10 but only took one art class in high school. He briefly considered art school but opted against it, a decision he later concluded gave him a leg up on his competitors.
“I wasn’t following anyone’s rules,” he said. “It was liberating for me, and maybe the clients, knowing that we were doing things outside the box.”
Potter studied history at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., where he met his future wife, Peggy. Her dorm friends nicknamed him Sparky, à la fire education mascot Sparky the Fire Dog, after they spotted him relieving himself on a bush one night.
“It was liberating for me, and maybe the clients, knowing that we were doing things outside the box.” Sparky Potter
In college, Potter attended parties in dilapidated North Country barns. The weathered barn wood became a common medium for his art projects, such as re-created beer and liquor bottles. In his senior year, he began playing around with a woodburning tool his grandmother had given him and some watercolor paints. Fascinated with medieval calligraphy and illustrated letters, he started reproducing the letters using the woodburning tool as his pen.
After graduation, Potter moved to Aspen, Colo., mostly to partake in the deep Rocky Mountain powder. He and a friend and fellow artist, Bobo Loguidice, would also rummage around abandoned ghost towns looking for unusually shaped wood to paint. Then they’d come home, he said, “have a beer, get stoned, burn wood and paint stuff.”
In 1971, he joined his fraternity brothers in the Mad River Valley, where they rented a house at Prickly Mountain in Warren. He later got a job with Sugarbush Resort’s ski patrol, which provided free lodging and paid $3 per hour. Potter thought he had made it.
Peggy, whose family often skied at Mad River Glen, had a boyfriend in the valley at the time. But after Potter gave her a lift from St. Lawrence to Vermont, she spent a night at his place.
“When Sparky picked me up at Mad River, he said, ‘You’re never gonna see that guy again, right?'” Peggy recalled. She didn’t. Before long, Sparky and Peggy were living together. They married in 1974 and had two daughters, Charlotte and Grace, and a son, Lee.
The Potters’ life as a young couple was typical of many ’70s ski bums. While Peggy waited tables at Sam Rupert’s Restaurant, Potter worked for the ski patrol, then spent his off-hours doing pyrography, or woodburning, to re-create now-classic album covers such as Jethro Tull’s Aqualung and Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman.
As Potter’s art pieces proliferated, Peggy started selling them at the local farmers market, eventually earning enough money for him to buy a jigsaw. Friends quickly noticed his work and asked if he would make them name signs for their houses, a task he happily took on.
Peggy is herself an accomplished artist and cofounder of Artisans’ Gallery in Waitsfield. For years she had her own business hand-painting wooden bowls, which she sold in galleries in New York City, Aspen, Japan and Italy. But when it came to Potter’s sign-making business, she said, “We decided pretty early on that divide-and-conquer was better for us.”
Because of his affinity for natural materials, Potter called the business Wood & Wood after noticing a jewelry store in Glastonbury, Conn., with that name.
In 1974, the Potters’ landlord raised their rent to $90 per month. Incensed, the couple built themselves a house on a hillside overlooking Waitsfield village. At the time, Potter was reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which he would later read to all three kids. It became, in his words, “our family bible.”
Tolkien’s work had a major influence on Potter’s style. It’s evident in his portfolios: hefty tomes, bound in ornately carved wooden covers, that resemble a wizard’s book of spells. It’s apparent in the front door and marquee that Potter designed years later for American Flatbread in Burlington and in the Potter family’s post-and-beam home and warren of outbuildings. The house features hobbit-inspired tables and medieval-looking doors, including one with a painting of Gandalf.
“I love Tolkien,” Potter said. “Reading those books taught me more about visuals and about drawing things that I had imagined.”
One of Potter’s more memorable signs from that era — for the Blue Tooth, then a popular tavern on the Sugarbush Access Road — featured Tom Bombadil, a bearded Tolkien character, holding a beer stein in one hand and a blue molar in the other. Because of its fantastical nature, the sign was stolen repeatedly.
Once, Potter recalled with bemusement, a couple of guys backed up a pickup, then used a chain saw to drop the sign into the bed, support posts and all, crushing the truck’s back end.
Signs of the Times
Potter’s first paying customer was Q.A. Pearson, a pilot from Greenwich, Conn., who owned a now-defunct grass strip in Waitsfield called Mad River Fly-In Airport. Because Pearson had a fondness for Bavaria, Potter researched the German state and, working with his new jigsaw and some old barn boards, made Pearson a sign that captured the aesthetic of Bavarian architecture. The airport disappeared long before the sign did.
“It stood there for 30 years without any maintenance,” Potter said proudly.
When the owner of nearby Gallagher’s Bar & Grill in Waitsfield saw the airport sign, he hired Potter to make one for his own business.
“The funny part is, he misspelled the name,” Peggy said with a chuckle.
“It was a weird beginning,” Potter added. And a valuable lesson: He never misspelled another sign.
By 1975, then-Sugarbush owner Damon Gadd and general manager Jack Murphy had taken notice of Potter’s artwork. As part of their effort to expand the resort and attract more out-of-state skiers, they hired Potter to remake all of its signage. When Roy Cohen bought the resort in 1977, he offered local business owners $400 apiece to add “at Sugarbush Valley” to their signage. While many locals chafed at Cohen’s effort to rebrand the Mad River Valley, quite a few businesses jumped at the opportunity — and hired Potter to do the work.
“Sparky’s signage started to pop all over,” recalled Blaise Carrig, 73, who met Potter as a fellow Mad River Valley ski bum and went on to become president of Vail Resorts’ mountain division. “It became part of the aura of the valley.”
Wood & Wood Signs took off just as Vermont was in the midst of its largest demographic expansion since the 1800s. An estimated 40,000 flatlanders, mostly young people, moved to Vermont between 1970 and 1980, many of whom eschewed conventional careers in favor of more earthy and creative pursuits such as farming, baking, woodworking, masonry. Potter’s signs both reflected that cultural shift and capitalized on it.
As his client list multiplied, Potter, who had long worked solo, finally needed help. So when Bobby Lane, one of Peggy’s coworkers, asked Potter for a job, Potter said he’d think about it. Before Peggy left for work one day, Potter asked her to make Lane an offer. Unfortunately for Lane, his brother, Dick, wore the same ponytail and wire-rimmed glasses, and Peggy had trouble telling them apart.
“I got the wrong brother,” she confessed. “Dick’s been with us ever since.”
In 1976, restaurateurs Tom Kennelly and Billy Hunter hired Potter to make a sign for their new Ice House Restaurant on Burlington’s waterfront. Unlike most of the generic metal and plastic signs of that era, Potter hand-carved his out of wood and painted on it a bucolic landscape that captured the building’s historic past. The image was inspired by a lithograph by Currier & Ives, a 19th-century print shop in New York that influenced several of Potter’s later projects.
“My hope was to add a level of old-world craftsmanship,” he said. “Signs don’t have to be just pure messaging by word.”
The Ice House sign took Potter more than a month to make, but he charged the restaurateurs a “rock-bottom price,” mostly to gain public exposure. It was also the first time Potter experimented with illumination. In those years, people typically hired an electrician to light their signs, and most weren’t very creative about it. When Potter lit the Ice House sign, with a pair of ornate, wrought-iron lamps, he said, “Damn! I guess we’re in the lighting business now.”
The collaboration didn’t end there. Potter also worked with Kennelly and Hunter to create the restaurant’s bar and an indoor mural. As often occurred, Potter became lifelong friends with his clients, who commissioned Wood & Wood for several other projects.
Indeed, much of the company’s work today comes from repeat customers: colleges and resorts undergoing remodels and new construction, as well as businesses that are rebranding. About half of the company’s clients are out of state. Peggy credits Joslin, who joined the company in 2000, with bringing in a number of large institutional customers, including Vermont State Employees Credit Union, which recently became EastRise Credit Union.
“When a bank changes names, we love that,” Joslin said with a smile.
Because Wood & Wood isn’t a publicly traded company, Potter declined to share its annual sales or number of clients but said the business aims for a healthy mix of small, medium and large jobs, ideally taking on two or three major projects each year. Last year, Wood & Wood produced more than 1,300 signs for 118 clients.
Make no mistake: Those signs aren’t cheap. Unlike many sign manufacturers, the company charges by the hour, not by the finished product. And because all the signs are handmade locally, prices skew “toward the middle to high end of things,” Potter said. “We’re not the bargain-basement place.”
Dan Cox, Potter’s longtime client and friend who first worked with Wood & Wood to create Green Mountain Coffee Roasters’ signage in 1981, remembers getting the initial quote for a single sign: $3,500.
“I choked,” Cox recalled. “I said, ‘Sparky, I need 25 of these things!'”
Nevertheless, like many Wood & Wood customers from the 1970s and ’80s, he returned to Potter with future projects.
Potter’s major breakout moment came in the run-up to the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Because Coca-Cola was one of the event’s largest advertisers, it wanted its logo visible throughout the village. The soda company agreed to cover half the cost of a new sign for any Lake Placid business that added a Coke logo.
Potter won the contract and spent months making new signs for about a dozen Adirondack clients, trying to ensure that the Coke logo was still consistent with the character of the business. Some, such as Sundog Ski and Sport, are still Wood & Wood clients.
ABC Sports, which broadcast the Games, also hired Potter to make its own signage that appeared on-screen behind its sportscasters. Though the 1980 Winter Olympics lasted just 12 days, it generated a decade’s worth of steady income for Potter and his growing team.
Drawing Inspiration
Wood & Wood is housed in a modern, barnlike building off Route 100 in Waitsfield, sandwiched between the Big Picture Community Hub for the Arts and Lawson’s Finest Liquids. (Naturally, both sport Wood & Wood signs.) As one would expect of a business started by a ski bum, it retains its laid-back, freewheeling vibe, beginning with the motley pack of dogs that announces the arrival of visitors.
For its first three decades, Wood & Wood was based at the Potters’ family compound, several hundred yards up the hill from its current location. Potter would regularly meet clients at his family’s dining room table. Because the shop had no running water, paintbrushes weren’t washed but sat in buckets of water, and employees routinely came inside the house to heat their lunches.
“Our house was always filled with people,” remembers Charlotte Potter Kasic, the Potters’ oldest child. All three kids grew up with paintbrushes in their hands, a common Christmas gift, and both Charlotte and Grace worked in their father’s paint shop as teens.
“It was a great way to be with friends, be creative, be busy and make money,” said Charlotte, 43, who remembers taking family vacations to places her father had work. For a time, they went each April to Nantucket, where Potter restored business signs in the island’s offseason.
When Wood & Wood finally moved down the hill, Charlotte said, it allowed the company to expand and modernize. It also made room for Grace to convert the old shop into a rehearsal space and launch her music career.
Charlotte went on to pursue a career as a glassblower, then a museum director. She briefly returned to work for her father while she considered taking over the business but realized it wasn’t in the cards.
“It was a full enigma to me how that business ran,” she said with a laugh, referring to the mix of artists, musicians and ski bums who’ve long made up Wood & Wood’s staff. “People were constantly coming and going because they had a gig to play or they wanted to catch a powder day. But it all works somehow.”
Potter still prefers meeting his clients with a pencil and sketch pad in hand. If they’re coming to Wood & Wood Signs, he seats his guests in a conference room festooned with a candy-store-like selection of signs, lettering, logos and three-dimensional icons.
Though Potter often speaks with rapid enthusiasm, he typically begins by letting his client do most of the talking. While they describe the new sign they envision for their restaurant, inn, boarding school or brewery, he’ll ask questions and listen intently. But mostly, he said, he tries to “absorb their energy.”
“As soon as I have an idea of what it is they’re driving at, I’ll start sketching,” Potter said. “People enjoy watching the pencil move.”
Years ago he taught himself to draw to scale, where one inch equals one foot, so that his client can clearly envision the finished product. Sometimes the concept comes together in minutes; other times, hours or days. Potter doesn’t do much work on computers himself and leaves that process to the younger designers, who convert his sketches, sometimes from a napkin or the back of an envelope, into digital files.
Bob Cook remembers going through the process with Potter many years ago, which he described as “inspiring” and “bloody fun.” Cook, now 85, spent 45 years managing ski resorts, including those at Killington, Stowe and Bear Mountain in California. His first of many collaborations with Potter involved a redesigned logo and entrance sign for Mad River Glen, the Fayston ski mountain.
“He fussed, and he fussed, and finally got something in front of us,” Cook recalled. “And we said, ‘Yeah!”
The result: Mad River Glen’s iconic six-pointed snowflake, which still stands decades later at the base of the mountain.
“I’ve always been a fan of his artistic vision and his creativity,” said Carrig, Potter’s old ski pal who now lives in Steamboat Springs, Colo., and worked with Wood & Wood many times over the years with various companies. In the mid-1990s, his boss, Les Otten, founder and CEO of the American Skiing Company, bought what Carrig described as a “no place” resort in Park City, Utah. It was named Park City West, but locals called it “Park Worst.” In 1995, Otten tried to revamp its reputation by renaming it Wolf Mountain.
“The signage was absolutely awful,” Carrig recalled. At the bottom of the access road was a sign he described as “a cartoon wolf from a bad Disney movie.”
So, in 1997, Carrig invited Potter to Utah to help him with the rebrand. Potter spent a week exploring the area, talking to locals, taking photos and conceptualizing the resort’s new look.
“It started with choosing a new font,” Potter explained. His goal was to capture the natural setting by choosing thick cutout letters that cast a big shadow, “the way mountains do.”
Potter incorporated the nearby peaks into his design, rounding their edges to make them look “soft as clouds and more surreal.” Next, he and Carrig went four-wheeling into the hills and found some beautiful red boulders to serve as the sign’s foundation.
“That became the magic ingredient,” Potter said. Into this natural-looking stone formation he embedded the sign bearing the resort’s new name: the Canyons. The logo quickly took on a life of its own and can now be seen in Utah airports.
“Sparky always surprised me, because in the end he would come back with something that you’re totally happy with,” said Carrig, who retired five years ago. “It might take a while, but we’d always get to where we wanted to be.”
‘Iconic Simplicity’
What is it exactly that makes Wood & Wood’s signs appealing? Though no two look alike, they share a common aesthetic.
“I see in them an iconic simplicity,” explained Doubleday, 62, the Champlain College professor of graphic design. “They’re not bound to any trendiness but maintain a very classic, enduring appeal.”
Doubleday also sees cultural and regional influences in Wood & Wood’s signs: the use of organic materials such as wood and stone that reflect Vermonters’ relationship to the natural environment; a rejection of homogenized, generic branding that is unmoored from its location; and a blend of modern and traditional typefaces that evoke a rustic and nostalgic feel, which speaks to Vermont’s rural living and artisanal traditions. All, he said, encapsulate a “place-based brand identity that aligns with … Vermont’s reputation for localism and sustainability.”
Tomlynn Biondo, 41, creative director at King Arthur Baking in Norwich, was immediately struck by Wood & Wood’s aesthetic when she was hired two years ago.
“Everything on campus that had a visual impact on me, I learned, was done by Wood & Wood,” said Biondo, a visual artist and brand designer who’d previously worked with such companies as Ben & Jerry’s, Timberland and Pepsi.
Biondo remembers arriving for her job interview and noticing the huge King Arthur logo on the side of the company’s manufacturing plant and its golden wheat stalks growing up the side of the building — all designed by Wood & Wood.
“It just had such a powerful visual impact on me,” she said. Ever since, whenever Biondo has a large design project, she calls Wood & Wood.
Potter’s other large design projects run the gamut. In August 1996, he helped his longtime friend — and Gandalf look-alike — Russ Bennett, founder of NorthLand Visual Design & Construction, create a makeshift village, of sorts, at a Phish festival called the Clifford Ball, held at the former U.S. Air Force base in Plattsburgh, N.Y.
Potter’s job was to manage Ball Square, an interactive art space at the center of the festival where tens of thousands of concertgoers could paint at will on the ground and walls. By any measure, Ball Square posed a logistical nightmare, keeping the paints and brushes confined to one area. But according to Bennett, Potter kept his cool.
“With Sparky, it’s never just about making signs,” he said. “We can affect human behavior by doing things that are interesting and beautiful.”
Recently, Potter took on an even more unconventional project. After Cox, his longtime client and friend, got both knees, a shoulder and a pacemaker replaced, he hired Potter to create a whimsical casket in which he would bury his surgically removed body parts. Cox then hosted an elaborate funeral attended by more than 150 guests.
The centerpiece of the tongue-in-cheek affair, he said, was Potter’s casket. Atop it sat a mannequin’s knee, with a mannequin arm and shoulder and a machete jutting from the side. It reflected Potter’s joie de vivre, which, like many of his signs, hasn’t faded over time.
“I don’t think Sparky has changed much,” Carrig said. “He’s still the essence of the hippie ski bum that we all were in the early ’70s.”
In the “bullpen,” an open-area workspace in the Wood & Wood shop where some of the dozen employees sit at computer screens and spitball ideas, staff keep a running list of Potter’s Yogi Berra-like malapropisms, or “Sparkyisms.” Among them: “We’re flying naked here,” “I’m chafing at the bit,” “I put these drawings in biblical order” and “It was great conceiving with you this afternoon.”
Joslin’s willingness to continue the business as it has operated for the past 50 years came as a great relief, to the Potters and their staff.
“Everyone loves Erik,” Peggy said. “The feeling that it’s going to carry on is so important.”
Said Joslin of Potter, “He’s a hard set of shoes to fill” — almost a Sparkyism in its own right.
Recently, Potter took a drive to St. Johnsbury, during which he passed many Wood & Wood signs. Reflecting on his career, Potter said the feelings they evoked weren’t about his own personal legacy so much as a reminder of the many collaborations he’s had with clients and staff over the years.
“Every once in a while,” he mused, “I’ve been able to look in the mirror and say, ‘You know, we are among the best on this planet at what we do.'”
The original print version of this article was headlined “A Marquee Career | Woodworker Sparky Potter has created some of Vermont’s most iconic signs. After half a century, he’s sold the business — but he isn’t hanging it up just yet.”
This article appears in May 14-20, 2025.
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