Great Design: Highway Gothic
As a child, driving the highways of New South Wales’ long and flat coasts, I was always fascinated by the signs that littered the road. They were green or brown with a thick white border. They were clear to read — even at speeds of over a hundred kilometres — but that wasn’t the interesting part. Who made them all? How and why could they be so perfect? Despite the tribal nature of Australia’s states, where even the rail gauges were never the same, how could they keep the same look all-over. Governments are notorious for being poor branders.
But is road signage the greatest coup in the design world?
From its modest beginnings, the designers of the early ‘FHWA’ standard of fonts wouldn’t have predicted it. In the late 1940s, the California Department of Transportation developed FHWA and its complex set of spacing formulas. You might know it better as Highway Gothic. There were six sizes that would be refined over the next few decades until in 2000, the final specification was published and adopted (in its various forms) by the USA, Mexico, Canada, Spain, Australia, Peru, the Netherlands and New Zealand.
I reckon that’s pretty big.
Remember, these signs have to be drawn up and manufactured around the world. In Australia, every state controls their roads individually. Despite this, every state manages to stick to a single typeface with the same rules for spacing and the rest.
Sure, you’d find an example of the use of Helvetica in every nation on Earth, but that can be used for anything or everything… or nothing. What Highway Gothic represents is homogenised design on a massive scale. Sure, it might be enforced by government standards, but such a widespread use must be rare. If you can think of any other visual communication that — for purely aesthetic reasons — that is used in the public sector, comment this post!
Helvetica is the standard without being a standard
In my own opinion it is a brilliant standard in a word of design where anything ’standard’ is considered taboo. Road signage is one of the few cases when consistent branding on a continental scale actually benefits the public. Sure, you could argue that the Coca-Colas and Apples of this world could improve their economies of scale by having the same logo, same advertisements, same website, worldwide. But it doesn’t work like that in commerce. For the unsuspecting roadside, it does.
With legibility and simplicity government in mind, a standard was always the best option.
Clearview is replacing FHWA in the US as of 2007
Highway Gothic, after a sixty year run, is being replaced by Clearview. Joshua Yaffa of the New York Times claims: “Looking at a sign in Clearview after reading one in Highway Gothic is like putting on a new pair of reading glasses: there’s a sudden lightness, a noticeable crispness to the letters.”
That very sentence springs to mind my own experience with — laugh if you want — Microsoft’s new Office software that came with Calibri as the standard font. It sure looked nice, but my love didn’t last. I found it gimmicky and surprisingly outdated only a couple of years later. The smooth edges were not practical from a perspective of readability and David Airey, designing a logo for Ecometrica, inadvertently agreed with me.
So whether Clearview will stand the test of time is anyone’s guess, but it is a much safer bet than Calibri. The Highway Gothic lineage is there for all to see. Don Meeker, the co-designer of Clearview is critical of the ancestral font, saying Highway Gothic made signs “a mess”. I’d hope Meeker would also see the font for the good it has done, especially in the context of the last half-century.
Highway Gothic or Clearview: you decide
If you’re interested in roadway signage type, have a look at NPS Rawlinson Roadway, the new standard adopted for American National Parks. James Montalbano over at Terminal Design had a lot to do with both Rawlinson and Clearview. Rawlinson replaced Clarendon, which was made all the way back in 1845.
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