Having a lovely time at Leicester comedy festival. Last night I saw Tom Burgess's Peter Fleming’s Dismally Ill-Prepared TV Pub Quiz and had a delightful time. It was so, so funny.
You can read a full account of this story on my Patreon OR come see me talk about it live at the Leicester comedy festival on Sunday!
Most of this information, I got from this wonderful article
Lund, Ole. "The public debate on Jock Kinneir’s road sign alphabet." Typography papers 5 (2003): 103-126.
Accessible here: jockkinneirlibrary.org/assets/media...
If you like your academic texts sassy, this is the one for you.
Two signs for a roundabout with turnings for Radlett, Watford, Birmingham, St. Albans. The one on the left is in the Kindersley font in all caps with serifs, and the the one on the right is in transport font in sentence case and sans serif.
Here's an illustration of the two fonts side by side.
The Transport font had already been much more rigorously tested (in a car park beneath Hyde Park) and so this particular test did not convince anyone to switch to the Kindersley font (much to the frustration of Kindersley).
But it was almost immediately pointed out that the test was done in fair weather conditions and also that the Kindersley font was written on the signs in larger letters.
I don't want to say the whole exercise was a waste of time but the whole exercise was a waste of time.
The adjudicators could read Kindersley's seriffed, all caps sign from 247ft and Kinneir and Calvert'# sans serif, sentence case sign from 240ft.
Which implies that the Kindersley font was actually the most suitable.
Let's talk about that research though. The key question was, which font was easiest to read at speed and from a distance? The test they used involved strapping road signs to a car and driving them (at speed) towards seated adjudicators who made note of when they could read the sign. Science!
The choice of font became so contentious that the BBC planned a debate about it on the Tonight programme.
Despite receiving significant criticism in the press, Kinneir was advised not to respond to the public discussion.
Instead, he and Calvert used their research to justify their design.
A big heavy hardback called Margaret Calvert Woman at Work by Thames and Hudson with a photo of Calvert's woman at work sign on the cover.
Taking a brief interlude in the history of road sign fonts thread to show off this cool new book my lovely wife bought me*.
*I'm trying not to buy any books this year and she was worried it would be difficult to get ahold of next year.
Kindersley was a very vocal critic of the Transport font. It may seem that "detest" is a very strong word to use about fonts but it applies here. He detested that it was sans serif and in sentence case and he particularly objected to "the awful M".
There were other designers, however, who felt they were better placed to choose the font for the nation's roadsigns. Most notably, David Kindersley who had already designed a font, the Kindersely MOT font, for use on street signs.
The key change that they made was creating a font with a lower case alphabet. Kinneir and Calvert wanted to be able to write place names on road signs in sentence case as they felt this made them easier to read. They argued that, e.g., Nottingham was more recognisable than NOTTINGHAM.
Transport was designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert in the late 50s. They had been commissioned to create signs for the Preston Bypass, the UK's first motorway, and felt that the existing standard font, the Llewellyn Alphabet, was not suitable when reading signs at such high speeds.
Road signs in the UK use a font specifically created for that purpose, called Transport. (Many countries signed up to the Vienna Convention use variations of this font.)
How Transport came to be the font of choice is a fascinating story as many elements of it were highly controversial...
The blue of a parking sign (in the UK) is pantone 300.
Here are more facts about the colour blue than you thought you needed:
www.patreon.com/posts/141127...
The parking sign dates back to the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics!
I'll be releasing a full patreon post all about it next week. In the mean time, there's a paid post about motorcycle helmets already up.
I thought you would think it was cool!
I've been doing some reading about parking signs recently and it turns out the history is super interesting.
Can you guess when the P in a blue rectangle parking sign was invented and for what event?
A photo of a bike rack, at dusk, with a P parking sign above a little icon of a bike.
Little parking signs for bikes are always adorable.
Amazing. Who wouldn't want a ham sandwich road sign!
You've gotta check they're legit though - there's an underground market in stolen street signs...
You can also just buy them. Some of them for like £30.
They just leave road signs lying around on the floor, no guards or nothing. Anyone could just pick one up and take it home...
You can read the full report on the Slough Safety Experiment here: ia801400.us.archive.org/20/items/op1...
And see a bunch of cool photos of the original signs and posters etc.
A red pen drawing of what is recognisably meant to be a hand - it has four fingers and a thumb but it has a double outline that makes it look super weird. The wrist turns into a res triangle pointing downwards.
This is supposed to be a hand btw but I am not good at hands. Tbf, the original posters, made in the early 50s, have something authoritarian about their nature (I presume bc they're built directly on war propaganda iconography) and so it's probably for the best I didn't accurately capture the image.
The Great Slough Experiment! Read all about how Slough was turned into a safety town on my patreon:
www.patreon.com/posts/148849...
A wall of road signs (an arrow pointing right in a circle), a man at work sign, a woman at work sign, a 70mph sign) but in bright colours - yellow, blue, red, orange and green.
Signs from the Margaret Calvert Exhibition at the OSH Gallery last year.
A red triangular warning sign with a yellow background and a black exclamation point. A supplementary sign that reads "LKW Ausfahrt uscita automezzi" and beneath that a drawing of a little digger with a person driving it. In the background is a beautiful blue sky and a ski lift and a mountain.
Another excellent road sign from Italy.
Welcome to Italy! If you want to know what specific brand of car it is you can read the deep dive on my patreon!
(Spoilers: I don't know very much about cars.)
