The typography of travel

image via sagebrushgis

There's a great article in Sunday's NY Times Magazine on a font. Well, two fonts.

Clearview is a new typeface that will be replacing the classic 'Highway Gothic' font on all the iconic green & white highway signage across the US. The existing typeface has been around for 50 years, but it was chosen without any thought during the rush in the 1950s to expand the American interstate system (it was also adopted as the predominant Canadian highway font). The problem is it has several problems with blurriness and illegibility, especially at night, and that's only becoming a bigger issue as the population ages. Clearview, by making subtle changes, is massively improved. US states are slowly adopting it, and Canadians can also see it popping up on new highway and road signs around Toronto.

The article is a good read on using design thinking, exploration and experimentation to address a complex web of issues (the type needed to be more legible, but couldn't be too different: you don't want a font calling attention to itself when people are speeding down the highway). It also gets into the relationship between public typography, sense of place, and national psyche. And, of course, it provides a reminder that marketers rarely miss an opportunity: Clearview is already AT&T's new corporate font.

But whenever I read articles like this I'm struck by how little you hear this kind of serious design thinking in agencies anymore. I think many of us agency folk have forgotten how to speak about design intelligently. We may have a good intuitive sense of what works, but when pressed on a rationale for our creative choices (typography, colours, layouts), we often can't back it up very well, and the conversation turns to subjective likes and dislikes. No wonder agencies are commodities these days: we've forgotten how to be experts.

Comments

[Ari Shomair]

On a related note, have you checked out the work of Richard Ankrom? He made a small documentary called Guerrilla Public Service where he "vandalized" some highway signs in the US to make them easier to understand / more informative.

[Kempton]

Jason, Thanks for the interesting post on Clearview. Cool.

Ari, Thanks for the YouTube video. I quite enjoyed it.

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