My wife and I have an arrangement. When I’m driving, she reads the street signs I can’t see, and when she’s drinking, I read the small print on her prescription bottles.
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I personally think both Clearview and Highway Gothic look wimpy and unclear next to either Frutiger Bold or the British Transport font.
Frutiger was specifically designed for airport use – commissioned for the Charles de Gaulle airport and designed by Adrian Frutiger to be easily readable while walking around big buildings. It’s used in tons of signage (especially in Europe) but isn’t as good for freeway/highway use because it’s fairly compressed and doesn’t have the unique characters that something like Transport uses, that make it easy to read while driving at speed.
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Came here to say that. The Clearview sign benefits from bolder strokes and more open loops (although the 'l’s lose readability points with those ugly tails) but the Highway Gothic sign has much more appropriate spacing and would be more readable under adverse conditions.
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Thought. What about using a simulator driving for checking legibility under adverse conditions (or, even better, computer model of human vision fed with the images under different conditions), and using a genetic algorithm to evolve the best font to fit the criteria? There was a show how it works for music here couple days ago. It works for turbine blade shapes. Why not fonts?
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I hope you properly traumatized some people with that. Well done!
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Wingdings. Life should be more surreal.
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How about they just get rid of the signs? That way, every highway trip becomes a new adventure! Hurrah!
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I remember thinking, when I first read about this font being mandated, “Someone must stand to rake in lots of money over this change.” I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised to find that was true. Crony capitalism at its finest.
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Zapfino? On my god.
Look, people. I’ve been doing this stuff professionally for 20-something years, and what we need on our highways isn’t clarity. It’s FUNKINESS. WAKE UP, SHEEPLE.
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I want to go to there.
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I think you’re onto something. Just add a little paisley around the border, and mandate that every highway is 420.
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10 billion memes can’t be wrong.
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or my personal font pariah Tekton
A maker of Helen Keller jokes! Most impressive.
You definitely brought the funk. It’s nowhere on the same level, but it reminded me of this:
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Good riddance. IMHO, Clearview is the Comic Sans of highway signage fonts. It probably started out as an attractive typeface before getting hammered completely out of shape in order to conform into some other metrics. It’s a terrible low-res TrueType font come to life.
It may improve readability at very small sizes, but at large sizes it just looks gross. Especially the numbers. Yuck.
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My old friend Bauhaus!! I almost used that for the fake sign. What the hell, here it is.
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I like “old typewriter” best…
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