Driving safety is not always a matter of air bags or brakes. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has honored a road sign typeface that was designed to improve legibility and safety. The National Design Triennial show now on view at the museum, called “Why Design Now?” includes Clearview, the improved type used on some highways.
http://exhibitions.cooperhewitt.org/Why-Design-Now/project/clearviewhwy-typeface
The type font is the work of graphic designer Donald Meeker, typeface designer James Montalbano and a team of human factors experts, according to the curators of the show, Ellen Lupton, Cara McCarty, Matilda McQuaid, and Cynthia Smith. It was tested and improved at The Larson Transportation Institute at Pennsylvania State University and Texas Transportation Institute. Texas and Pennsylvania. I wrote about it for the NY Times in 2005.
The letters are easier to read at night, especially helpful for the increasing number of aging drivers on the road. The designs replace the older ones, used by most states and cities, called Highway Gothic. The team behind the type faces spent fifteen years refining and testing it.
Headlights tend to blur type, an effect called halation. The improvement is larger open spaces in the letters and bolder descenders or tails.
The catalog for the show explains that in the old type “the open spaces in the characters, such as the bowl of the lowercase ‘a,” are too small, making the letters hard to read.” This is especially true at night, when headlights strike the reflectorized signs. The new letters have larger open spaces.
The designers have also raised the height of cross bars, which tends to make letters easier to distinguish. Lifting the waistlines of letters is called by type designers increasing the ‘x level” where the cross bars strike. Tests showed that Clearview could be read at 1000 feet away while its older rivals required getting within 700 feet.
The challenge was not just creating a clearer type, but creating one that fit the same space and did not require new and larger signs.
Sign standards change slowly, thanks to conservative and careful organizations of transportation officials and engineers.
It took years of testing before the Federal Highway Administration would grant even interim approval of the new type face, in 2004. Now over twenty states are using it to some degree. Drive I-80 in central Pennsylvania for samples.
http://exhibitions.cooperhewitt.org/Why-Design-Now/project/clearviewhwy-typeface
The type font is the work of graphic designer Donald Meeker, typeface designer James Montalbano and a team of human factors experts, according to the curators of the show, Ellen Lupton, Cara McCarty, Matilda McQuaid, and Cynthia Smith. It was tested and improved at The Larson Transportation Institute at Pennsylvania State University and Texas Transportation Institute. Texas and Pennsylvania. I wrote about it for the NY Times in 2005.
The letters are easier to read at night, especially helpful for the increasing number of aging drivers on the road. The designs replace the older ones, used by most states and cities, called Highway Gothic. The team behind the type faces spent fifteen years refining and testing it.
Headlights tend to blur type, an effect called halation. The improvement is larger open spaces in the letters and bolder descenders or tails.
The catalog for the show explains that in the old type “the open spaces in the characters, such as the bowl of the lowercase ‘a,” are too small, making the letters hard to read.” This is especially true at night, when headlights strike the reflectorized signs. The new letters have larger open spaces.
The designers have also raised the height of cross bars, which tends to make letters easier to distinguish. Lifting the waistlines of letters is called by type designers increasing the ‘x level” where the cross bars strike. Tests showed that Clearview could be read at 1000 feet away while its older rivals required getting within 700 feet.
The challenge was not just creating a clearer type, but creating one that fit the same space and did not require new and larger signs.
Sign standards change slowly, thanks to conservative and careful organizations of transportation officials and engineers.
It took years of testing before the Federal Highway Administration would grant even interim approval of the new type face, in 2004. Now over twenty states are using it to some degree. Drive I-80 in central Pennsylvania for samples.
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