CBRD Blog

Fun with signs

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Road Research Laboratory did a lot of work on road sign design - and specifically, on how to design signs that could be read easily and quickly when travelling at speed. Some of their work is described in the CBRD feature War to Worboys.

The fact that almost every country has its own unique approach to the design of lettering on road signs is testament to the fact that you could discuss this one until the proverbial cows come home. Here in the UK, graphic designer Jock Kinneir was set to work designing the lettering we now know as Transport. He followed the advice of the RRL and gave us mixed case lettering, with different weighting (i.e., different thicknesses of line) for light-on-dark and dark-on-light, a carefully chosen balance of white space, letter spacing and kerning, and a friendly appearance with a great deal of character.

But really it could have gone either way. In America, road sign lettering leaves much less blank space so that, for example, the ‘hook’ across the top of the lowercase ‘a’ is more liable to be blurred into the rest of the letter. Their characters are generally wider and chunkier when used at full width, but sign designers can choose from a range of character sets with taller, slimmer lettering to fit their message on to the sign if need be.

France went for all-capitals (the jury is still, in all truthfulness, out on whether uppercase or mixed-case lettering is more legible; if you ask me I think you need to judge each case on its merits, and it matters more how widely you space your letters and how well you design them). Germany adopted a pre-existing typeface designed for clarity on engineering drawings. And so on.

This started me wondering just how much the form of lettering influences the appearance and personality of our road signs, so I did a little experiment.

On the left is an advance direction sign for a primary route crossroads as it appears in the TSRGD (Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions, the UK road sign Bible). Perfectly normal, I think you’ll agree.

How does it change if you render the text in, say, the French Caracteres L1 or in the German DIN Mittelschrift? Well, it’s time to find out…

Here it is in Caracteres L1. It’s not quite correct for French road sign typography: I’m fairly sure, for one thing, that the spacing between letters is too tight, and since drawing the image up, I’m now aware that actually light-on-dark text should have been in Caracteres L2. But it’s close enough.

And it looks… strange. It’s still perfectly clear, but the simple act of rendering the text in chunky Gallic capitals makes it, somehow, a little less businesslike. I’m not sure exactly why.

Of course, Caracteres wasn’t designed for use this way, it was designed to have one word per individual sign panel, with masses of white space around it. The French are excessively bad at diagrammatic signs, and while before I thought that was the whole story, now I think maybe their lettering contributes to the overall poor effect of their map-type signs.

And here’s the same sign, now in DIN Mittelschrift. In comparison to chunky Transport and the borderline-obese Caracteres, the German lettering looks very thin, especially in black on white. It’s almost lost on all that empty sign.

But good heavens, doesn’t it look clean and clinical? The ’steam railway’ panel takes on a whole new air, like perhaps it is to be used instructively and not for enjoyment. The B1991 is a cold, harsh numerical reference. Dorfield might be a prison.

Okay, I’m getting carried away. But while the outline of the sign is clearly still British, the whole character of the sign has changed again.

So what have we learned? Not a great deal. I personally have learned how to edit pictures of road signs to use different typefaces. But this little experiment does prove something interesting: that graphic design is not everything. Yes, French signs could easily be distinguished from UK ones by the outline of the sign panel, the shape of the arrows, and so on. But the lettering really can be the clincher.