Kudos to the developer / bureaucratic red tape / change is BAD fighter. I’m not a typographic designer, but I can appreciate the use of a “thinner” line font, less reflective material = less glare. It looks like someone is possibly going to be researching “Optimizing Regulatory and Warning Signs Using the Clearview Typeface System” for $250,000 in FY2006. It seems to me that Clearview is a step in this direction. When designing guide signs (white on green) for urban settings, many signs, using current standards, end up being billboards visible 300 ft away! The current FHWA standards are in real need of any development that makes smaller cap heights possible/legible, esp. Arrgh.Īs part of my profession I design highway signs.
The real pain about getting highway sign contracts is not the font and/or software puchases. The difference in quality seems even more exaggerated now that one can drive down into Texas, such as cities like Wichita Falls, and see those nice, new signs set in Clearview. There’s actually some “big green signs” in Oklahoma City with Arial on them! Bad letter spacing, non-standard line spacing and other mistakes are fairly common. The highway sign situation in Oklahoma is kind of a mess anyway. If our sign company gets some DOT signage projects sometime soon we may purchase the package, partly as a means to attract even more of that kind of work. But those fonts aren’t really meant for anyone to use casually. $795 might seem a bit steep for the ClearviewHwy package from Terminal Design. They likely have a very sizeable investment of their own in that typeface and expect to get some kind of return. But Meeker and Associates own the copyright to the typeface and have worked for well over a decade developing all the different weights to it, including ClearviewHwy. I don’t know the percentage of funding the federal government provided for the development of Clearview. If anyone has a spare $500,000 or so, that would probably be enough to get a good way to it. We would like the opportunity to test our hypothesis.
Since ClearviewHwy has a different set of proportion of caps to lowercase, our hypothesis is that you can reduce the specified cap height of ClearviewHwy and still maintain better legibility and recognition than a larger cap height Standard Highway Alphabet Series Emod font. With the standard of 50 feet of distance per inch of cap height. Currently all FHWA specifications are based on cap height. What should really be done (if we ever get the research funding) is to completely revisit all of the engineering standards that go into the size specification of signage typography. I hope I am finally done, but since we are in the process of getting funding for research into negative contrast applications, so I’m sure I’ll draw some more. Over last ten years I have drawn close to 200 different Clearview fonts for various purposes, clients and research studies. Don started this 14 years ago and brought me in 10 years ago. Don contacted me when it became clear he wasn’t going to be able to do the type design. He began work on the design and the initial research. Don Meeker came up with the idea, decided a better solution was possible. The Clearview Parkway on Long Island never “commissioned” Clearview (I’m unaware that it is even being used on the Clearview). To me, European signage type is a bit cold, although the signage systems overall tend to be more usable. How much driving have you done in the US? Majoor’s Telefont: no trapping – big red flag on that one, sorry. Although I also miss having two superpowers. Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that really spoke to me: “Dude, where’s my country?” I miss America. The good things, like fairness, and adventurism, are fading fast: look at how the world is treated, and how parks no longer have see-saws. What attracted me to America is still in me, and it’s still in America, but “hamuh pakhav”, as we say in Armenian: the taste is gone. I’ve changed (although maybe not for the better – but I’m me, not a state), and the US has too (and few would say for the better). Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.