CLEARVIEW FONT DRIVERS

CLEARVIEW FONT DRIVERS

As it turned out, the same solutions that helped older drivers read from a distance were the same as those that helped reduce the negative effects of halation. But as we use increasingly reflective materials on signs, more light is reflected back at the driver, which blows out the image, turning it into a glowing blob. This wasn't much of an issue when the FHWA rolled out Highway Gothic. Halation is the tendency of bright objects to appear fuzzy around the edges. In Meeker's view, the old Highway Gothic was unable to solve two modern problems: the country's aging drivers and halation. He found that, using the approved fonts, he couldn't add additional information to the signs without making them look cluttered and difficult to read. Meeker became passionate about the topic when he was redesigning scenic-tour signs for the state of Oregon in 1989. It was the first real go at overhauling the decades-old style of the streets.

It lacks the intrigue implicit in 'Highway Gothic.' As font names go, 'Clearview' is perhaps a bit too on the nose, akin to naming a car the Toyota Solid Transportation. Designers Don Meeker and James Montalbano created a font called Clearview to replace Highway Gothic. In fact, two men have been waging a two-decade insurgency in the world of highway fonts. It's not just fussy magazine types who care about such matters. 'He loves Interstate,' one of our designers said, pointing at the open seat of a junior designer. When I proposed that this column be printed using a font called Interstate-a commercial typeface inspired by Highway Gothic-I was told derisively, 'We don't use Interstate.' They crinkle their noses at poor 'type treatment' as if they've just whiffed the inside of a Corvette on a hot day. They have strong feelings about many things. That would be the two designers in Car and Driver's art department. Not 30 feet from where I type these words sit two such men, both clad in black T-shirts. Who cares about such matters, apart from bureaucrats? Well, as it turns out, a number of people. You don't say, 'The Italian old beautiful car.' But you no more make note of this chubby sans-serif typeface than you recognize that you place adjectives in front of a noun in a particular pattern. It's seeped into our unconscious by way of ubiquity, being the only approved font for road signage. But in one or another of its various versions (A, B, C, D, E, E Modified, and F, from narrowest to thickest), Highway Gothic has been the mother tongue of our vehicular lives. Unless you're a very particular kind of obsessive, you probably haven't noticed it. Enter Highway Gothic, officially known by the far sexier moniker of Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Standard Alphabets for Traffic-Control Devices. As automobile speeds increased, the inconsistent legibility of this grab-bag approach proved, er, suboptimal. Way back before the 1950s-around the time Nissan launched the current GT-R-there was on the streets of this great nation a shameful hodgepodge of different highway sign colors, shapes, and fonts. Or did until a new font came along to steal the old font's job. (Hint: It's the one I'm attempting to use in the writing of this column.) But on a federal level, there is only a currently dominant language. To the consternation of people who are about to write letters to the editor, allow me to point out that the United States has no official language. From the August 2019 issue of Car and Driver.

Clearview font