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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For some people the highways became a funny trip and never think of care they must to have every time they go over there.

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Unfortunately, not everyone can live in a huge house with a ton of rooms and bathrooms.

[Travel Insurance]

It is important that we come up with these special fonts for Highway signage to have faster recognition at increased distances and also to avoid road accidents.

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I am slowly learning the ropes of ‘proper web deign’ and finding out about all the specialities, but I wouldn’t have thought that people would be giving talks on web typography. You guys obviously take your work very seriously.

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yeah, it was an important article, specially the amount of information used. By the way, I think you should add more information about its typefaces.

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For some people the highways became a funny trip and never think of care they must to have every time they go over there

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

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

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