Every country has a distinct highway sign font (lettering design) that adds local personality and style. In American, Highway Gothic has been the official font for the last fifty years. It was designed before there were reflective paints and halogen headlamps that cause signs to get all fuzzy and hard to read at night, a phenomenon called halation.
Don Meeker, an environmental graphic designer, and James Montalbano, a type designer spent more than ten years tweaking and testing the typeface they call Clearview and running down Federal bureaucracies until they convinced enough of the right people that they had a winner. As old Highway Gothic signs are coming down new Clearview signs are going up. Most people won’t notice the change but the signs will be easier to read at night and from at least 200 ft (60m) further away. Even AT&T adopted Clearview for all its advertising and corporate communications and in a follow-up survey, positive consumer response to its brand name had doubled.
What I saw, Pietrucha knew, was what we all may see soon enough as we rush along America’s 46,871 miles of Interstate highways. What I saw was Clearview, the typeface that is poised to replace Highway Gothic, the standard that has been used on signs across the country for more than a half-century. 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.
The Federal Highway Administration granted Clearview interim approval in 2004, meaning that individual states are free to begin using it in all their road signs. More than 20 states have already adopted the typeface, replacing existing signs one by one as old ones wear out. Some places have been quicker to make the switch — much of Route I-80 in western Pennsylvania is marked by signs in Clearview, as are the roads around Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — but it will very likely take decades for the rest of the country to finish the roadside makeover. It is a slow, almost imperceptible process. But eventually the entire country could be looking at Clearview.
(nytimes)
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