![]() According to FHWA, having to pay to use the font-even for fairly reasonable sums-was an issue for many states. ![]() Unlike in-house designed Highway Gothic (officially called “FHWA Standard Alphabets”) that is free to use, Meeker licenses out Clearview to state agencies and individual clients. Highway signs are also the single greatest manifestation of government that most all citizens interact with on a daily basis and this ubiquitous assault need not be so daunting. ![]() This system is a tiny fraction of all the nations’ roads but it drives the system. Highway signs are the one thing that has not changed in any fundamental way since the early 1960s when there was a upgrade to accommodate the “new” Eisenhower Interstate Defense Highway System. It is fair to say that this has never been approached as a systematic design effort and designers are not part of the equation-as it was when Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert redesigned the road signs in 1964 in the UK. These small typographic refinements were posited to improve legibility of the letters without increasing font sizes. They also increased the negative space in the letters “a” and “e,” which tend to close in from a distance. They eliminated “light traps” or tiny notches in joints of the letterforms and cleaned up the letters’ shapes to mitigate the halo effect at night, due to the sign’s reflective surface. Meeker, O’Hara and Montalbano redrew the letterforms in Clearview specifically to counter bad road conditions. In 2004, Meeker together with graphic designer Chris O’Hara and type designer James Montalbano, proposed Clearview as a solution. Prior to designing Clearview, Meeker ran a thriving practice designing wayfinding systems for national parks, schools, and public projects. He was inspired to take action by the discombobulating array of route numbers, exist signs, and town names that clutter US highways, Meeker explained at the Society for Experiential Graphic Design conference last year. “There’s nothing more assaulting and daunting…than highway signs,” he said, calling the US official signage system “dysfunctional, frenetic, wild and uncontrolled.” FHWA believes that sign’s surface (or retroreflective sheeting material) has the biggest impact on legibility, not the typeface. But the FHWA’s spokesperson Doug Hecox explains its popularity to Quartz as likely “attributable to the fact that older, worn signs were replaced with new, clean ones using brighter materials.” The agency has been working with sociologists, chemists, photospectrometrists, and various experts to develop road sign solutions, especially for older drivers. Over 25 US states currently use the font on road signs. ![]() Every state in the union must now use an older, officially sanctioned font, known colloquially as ”Highway Gothic.”Ĭlearview was warmly received when it was introduced back in 2004. The edict applies across all 50,000 miles of freeway and four million miles of road in America. 25 issue of government publication Federal Register, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) announced that it will deauthorize the use of Clearview as a typeface for signage. After 12 years of deliberation, the US government finally took action on a controversial subject: Fonts.
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