![]() Photo by Ammodramus (Own work), via Wikimedia CommonsĪ road trip in America is therefore very much an experience in the FHWA Series. While Transport is used for road signs, street names tend to be signed by local planning authorities (rather than local transport authorities) using completely different fonts. Street names in American towns and cities are often displayed as road signs at intersections, so the FHWA Series have become much more integral to the local identity of streets than the British equivalent typeface, Transport, has in Britain. Mixed case signage tends to be used on signs where place names are given (such as mileage or directional signs). This gives them a forcefulness that ensures a slightly different feel to the driving experience. Photo by User:MPD01605 (Own work), via Wikimedia CommonsĪmerican road signs tend to use more text than those in Europe, and this is often formed of all-upper case words. Series E is used on directional and distance signs like these in Maryland. You can see them in Chapter 6 of the FHWA’s Standard Highway Signs, Standard Alphabets for Traffic Signs ( here). Each uses the same base letter shape but gradually extends it (makes it wider, in other words) from series A, with the narrowest letters, to series F, with the widest. He started work on road sign legibility in 1939 and eventually designed the typeface which effectively became Series E of the FHWA Series (Robinson (2011): p23).Īltogether there have been seven different versions of the typeface, Series A (now discontinued in America) through to Series F, via E(M) – the first version to gain a lower case version. ![]() Forbes was an engineering psychologist who worked on various traffic projects including overtaking behaviour by drivers. It is based on lettering developed originally for Californian road signs by Theodore Forbes, before being developed into a national standard by the FHWA (as explained here). Its official title is the FHWA Series, though you will sometimes see it called Highway Gothic, a strictly unofficial name. So anonymous was it when developed, it has never had a proper name. Here it is: A sample from the FHWA Series via Wikimedia Commons I could rave all day about the iconic Railroad Crossing and other brilliant road signs in the manual, but I’ll try to keep things more focussed by examining one of the elements that has the greatest impact on the character of American road signage: the typeface employed. Defined by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in its Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, these include all the symbols that mark out typically American road signage. Yet it started off as an all-but-anonymous typeface on the road signs of that great automobile country, America.Ī great automobile country needs great signage on its roads. It has escaped its original confines and spread out into the wider world, finding itself in a variety of places its original designers could never have expected. ![]() This is the story of a transport typeface gone rogue.
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