New highway font

[mmcirvin]

On our road trip to Pennsylvania last weekend, we saw many signs in this new highway font (approved as an optional interim standard that states can choose to use if they want it). The variants of Clearview look so much more like a standard commercial font than the old highway fonts do that I'd initally wondered if they just picked something at random off the shelf, but the modified lowercase l (bent over like the one in Edward Johnston's London Underground font) convinced me that it was a new custom design. There are assorted comments here.

Judging from that site, the designers appear to have done a lot of research; the initial motivation for Clearview was to produce a font that was more legible for older drivers at night. It does look strange to unfamiliar eyes, though, especially when combined with signs in the old font. The old American highway font had a sort of studied Jack Webb neutrality to it: no nonsense, ma'am, here are the facts. Clearview looks like it's trying a little too hard to be your friend, and I wonder if it might make it a little harder to distinguish official highway signs from advertisements. Maybe I just have to get used to it.

Comments

[sultmhoor.livejournal.com]

Even though they don't list Michigan as one of the states adopting it, I know I've seen a few signs around here in the new typeface. I was wondering if they were a mistake, but I guess not!

I'm going to miss the old typeface though, it has a certain summer late-night travelling on I-75 in backwoods rural northern Michigan nostalgic quality to me.

2004?

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

Is it really that new? I would have said I'd been seeing it for years. Maybe the past two years have just been extra-long.

I don't think there's much danger of confusion with commercial signs; in particular, the ends of the curved strokes are still clinically right-angled. I do remember thinking the extra-high center line made it look kind of second-grade-ish at first, but I thought that about the silly truncated tails in E-modified at first, too. After some exposure, I find it somewhat more attractive and considerably more legible.

So is "reduced inter-letterspace" really an industry term, or just a particularly apt typo?

[kodi]

I think the things I like about Highway Gothic are the things that make it less legible than Clearview. I love the quirky lowercase a, e and g, but the Clearview versions are certainly easier to read. It sounds like mostly I agree with you - there were features of Highway Gothic that made it seem bluntly utilitarian and set it apart from everything else you see on the road, and Clearview looks like just another font by comparison.

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

I just read a discussion of highway sign typography with avid interest.

What have you and Kibo done to me?

Re: 2004?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I gather from discussions elsewhere that that stretch of I-84 north of Scranton was one of the first places in the country to put up the new signs. I'm pretty sure they weren't there in the spring of 2003, because that was the last time I was there, and I probably would have noticed them. So 2004 can't be far off.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I can't find it at the moment, but I found another discussion of the new font going back to early 2004 that seemed to be mostly rage-filled posts excoriating it. The objections mostly fell into a few distinct categories:

1. The new font is less legible than the old one, despite what anyone's study says, because it's obvious. (One poster claimed to be completely unable to read the new signs from a distance of more than 25 feet.)

2. The new font is more legible than the old one, but this doesn't matter, because anyone who ever had trouble reading the old font shouldn't be driving a car anyway. (A variant of the familiar "bad user interfaces are good because they weed out the incompetent" line of reasoning.)

3. The new font is the product of poncy graphic designers who wanted change for the sake of change, or for aesthetic reasons, and ginned up a fake study to waste the taxpayers' money.

4. The new font looks like foreigners designed it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...One objector did cite studies indicating that the legibility advantage is small in practice, and argued that this didn't justify the expense involved. That made more sense than most of them.

Re: 2004?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Though this post from late 2002 (https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0212&L=typo-l&T=0&P=2131) implies that use in Pennsylvania and Texas had already begun by then, and an earlier version of the font had been tested in PA earlier. So I'm not sure.

my mistake

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

I seem to have been confused by an example of an even older mixed-case sign typeface that I can't find now, with a much lower center line (or whatever the x-height is correctly called), thinner strokes, and much longer descenders. The signs that I was thinking of as "new" actually match the Series 2000 specification. How different is that from the 1977 version?

Re: my mistake

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That looks like it's just an attempt to bring something visually similar to the old standard into the age of digital typography.

Massachusetts hasn't adopted Clearview, but there is a mixture of new signs and some seriously old ones. Here and there you can see a few with "button copy" (the letters with round reflectors in them) predating the use of modern reflective materials. On I-93 there are some signs for the 95 exits that have modern reflective type but button copy on the interstate shields. There are also many local signs predating the MUTCD, and a lot of signs on the parkways maintained by the state Department of Conservation and Recreation (formerly the Metropolitan District Commission) that are extremely nonstandard, with haphazard formats, Helvetica lettering, routings for US 1 that haven't existed for ages, and other craziness.

Re: my mistake

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...the signs on Storrow Drive (http://web.mit.edu/smalpert/www/roads/ma/storrow/2.html) / Embankment Road (http://web.mit.edu/smalpert/www/roads/ma/ma_3/2.html) and Memorial Drive (http://web.mit.edu/smalpert/www/roads/ma/us_3/2.html) are fairly typical of the genre.

[jwgh]

The new font looks like foreigners designed it.

I wondered about that backwards 'R'.