What's your favorite street blade design?

[wolfiefrick]

I'm a bit confused. I've been seeing mixed-case in STL for a while now. The intersections around the 64/170 interchange come to mind as being new when I was last there, and Street View confirms that street blades were mixed-case back then. Unless there's different standards for those mounted above stop signs, and I just don't remember noticing.

Although it hadn't been rebuilt when I was there last, the intersection of McCausland and Clayton also has mixed-case signs (circa 2014); are these maintained by the state?

Yeah, there are different standards for overhead/stoplight signage and atop-stop-sign assemblies. St. Louis County is still going to hang onto the bracketed all-caps signs for minor residential streets in subdivisions, but main roads will get the mixed case treatment for non-signalized intersections, too.

I think the McCausland/Clayton intersection is maintained by St. Louis City, though – it's just barely within the city limits and the city is not a part of the county.

[fillup420]

as mentioned previously, North Carolina has a wide variety of street blade designs, some of which are.... bad. One thing NCDOT does that bugs me involves the wording on some street blades. Sometimes state/US highways will be signed on street blades in a format like "NC 150 Hwy" or "US 70 Hwy". One particularly bad instance I saw the other day in Apex read "US Hwy #64". Like come on, there is no reason for the # symbol on a street blade.

[Scott5114]

What makes this more interesting is that it looks like St. Louis County is using a modernized or redrawn version of FHWA Series B here – look at the shape of the "e" and "c" and compare them to the standard alphabets in the MUTCD (or SHS; can't remember which of which document the alphabets are a component).

That's actually the older version of lowercase Series B that some private business drew up before there were standard lowercase letters in SHS. It still floats around and gets used instead of the standard alphabets sometimes, which I appreciate, since it's much better than the standard ones, in my opinion. For lack of a better term I usually call this version the "chocolate" FHWA Series, in contrast to vanilla FHWA Series found in SHS.

[wolfiefrick]

What makes this more interesting is that it looks like St. Louis County is using a modernized or redrawn version of FHWA Series B here – look at the shape of the "e" and "c" and compare them to the standard alphabets in the MUTCD (or SHS; can't remember which of which document the alphabets are a component).

That's actually the older version of lowercase Series B that some private business drew up before there were standard lowercase letters in SHS. It still floats around and gets used instead of the standard alphabets sometimes, which I appreciate, since it's much better than the standard ones, in my opinion. For lack of a better term I usually call this version the "chocolate" FHWA Series, in contrast to vanilla FHWA Series found in SHS.

Ah, that would explain it. I like this version much better. Do you know if there's a place I can get it? Or at least the alphabets so I can draw my own version?

[Scott5114]

Given that it's not an official government standard, I don't think a standard version of the alphabets exist. At some point someone uploaded a version of them by the name PIXymbolsHG*2002 (where the * is the series letter), but there's also a version of them with the same name that uses the vanilla glyphs. They also choked in Inkscape, which implies there's something mis-specified in the TTF files. If I remember correctly I could only get Series C to work properly.

It would probably be best if someone drew their own version and released them for hobbyist use, but that would probably involve a lot of eyeballing from/tracing over photos. One nice thing is that the chocolate glyphs are lowercase only; the upper-case is the same as the vanilla glyphs. 3

ETA: Page 1 of this thread has a good number of examples of the chocolate variety. The 'e' is a dead giveaway, since the counter space doesn't stay at a constant distance from the exterior outline of the glyph. 'o' is also quite a bit narrower/more oval than it is in vanilla. 's' is also a good example; the terminals actually somewhat line up with the outlying curves, instead of stopping short as they do in vanilla.

[wolfiefrick]

Given that it's not an official government standard, I don't think a standard version of the alphabets exist. At some point someone uploaded a version of them by the name PIXymbolsHG*2002 (where the * is the series letter), but there's also a version of them with the same name that uses the vanilla glyphs. They also choked in Inkscape, which implies there's something mis-specified in the TTF files. If I remember correctly I could only get Series C to work properly.

I just did a bit of research on the PIXymbols Highway Gothic family. The PIXymbols fonts were drawn by a guy named Rob Vershen under the name of a foundry called Page Studio Graphics (www.vershen.com).

There are two entries in the catalog for Highway Gothic.

   
• The first is PIXymbols Highway Gothic B to E(M), which, according to Vershen, were drawn to the specifications outlined in the standard alphabets from 1966 and 1977 (reprinted in '84 and '82, respectively – I assume he's talking about the imperial and metric standards). Although the FHWA Series outside of E(M) has only had lowercase letters since 2002, these fonts appear to all have lowercase glyphs, but I can't find a download for them anywhere.
• The second is PIXymbols Highway Gothic 2002 (series B to F), which was released in 2002 in accordance with the version of the Standard Highway Signs manual from that same year. The alphabets are drawn to the specifications from the 2002 revision to the millennium edition of the MUTCD. This typeface appears to be the variant you mentioned which uses vanilla glyphs, so the earlier version probably has chocolate glyphs.

While combing through the internet to try to find a download for either of those fonts, a sketchy Russian font board had a download for a "PF Highway Gothic Compressed," a FHWA Series B trace designed by Parachute Fonts which has a copyright date of 1993-2002 – before the FHWA added lowercase letters to all variants of Highway Gothic. Strangely enough, Parachute Fonts' website doesn't even show the typeface, but it definitely exists.

The lowercase glyphs in PF Highway Gothic Compressed are much more akin to the chocolate glyphs in the sign I posted earlier, but there are some minor differences. For instance, the letter "c" in the mysterious St. Louis County font has tapered terminals, but in PF HG Comp, the stroke width is uniform; the terminal of the "e" is not as angular as it is in the St. Louis County font either. Those same tapered terminals on the lowercase "c" are actually present in PIXsymbols Highway Gothic Series C (not the 2002 version), but not Series B like in the St. Louis County font. This is very interesting.