Funny you say that: the legend was "Mercedes Dr." No descenders to blame, just someone not even bothering to hit the center button.
There's actually a good chance their shop drawings mandated the upward shift of lettering placement on all signs to make room for decenders regardless if the sign lettering had any decenders or not. Maybe someone finally took notice of how stupid the end results were looking and decided to change it.
The whole problem goes back to changes in the MUTCD mandating mixed case lettering on signs. For the longest time most small street signs were set with uppercase lettering. To save money on material the sign panels provided only a small amount of negative space around the all-caps lettering. With the rules shifted to mixed case legends the street name sign panels all needed to be significantly taller. More room was needed those decenders, especially if the line of lettering was going to be properly centered on the panel. That translates into a larger, more costly sign panel. Rather than blow more money on taller sign panels we've been seeing all sorts of design travesties influenced by cost cutting. It makes me wonder if some of those really stupid looking street name signs with very tiny lowercase letters were made that way deliberately. They saw the rule about MUTCD approved fonts (with lowercase letters 75% of the cap letter height) and took that as an opportunity to keep using narrow panels meant only for uppercase lettering.
This isn't the first time that Norman has made a legitimate attempt at QA. There was one mastarm sign that a contractor installed that had text so horizontally compressed that it was nearly unreadable. The city quickly replaced it with one of their own signs.
When a sign (or any piece of graphic design work) has lettering stretched or squeezed out of its original, native proportions it's a pretty good indicator an amateur or hack did the "design" work.
I'll do just about anything to avoid distorting typefaces out of their normal proportions. I can't stand the warped, fun house mirror look of distorted type. You'll see it on many garbage-quality signs, often with the lettering set in a default font like Arial Bold or Black. God forbid the "designer" scroll down in the font list to a natively condensed or extended type choice.
Two kinds of "designers" distort type: ones who don't know better and others who just don't care. The ones who don't know better can learn and improve the quality of their work. As for the ones who don't care: f### them. They need to get another job and stop visually crapping on the landscape.
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Topic: Oklahoma Highways | Small projects and construction (Read 48785 times)