The Clearview thread

[DaBigE]

It's obvious many road geeks have a sentimental attachment to Series Gothic. I personally wouldn't use it for anything else other than a traffic sign layout. To me it's a fairly crude typeface compared to so many other sans serif type families.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something about the FHWA Series family that just feels official. Over-saturation due to how many road signs there are? Age of the typeface? Some combination of the two? In any case, I'm still of the camp "if it ain't broke don't fix it". Has anyone seen any data with regard to how much of an issue sign legibility is given the most current sign materials? Is there a problem worth the time, effort, and in the case of some roadgeeks, heartache? Back when WisDOT was experimenting with it (and the various local media outlets covered the story), there were editorials that followed about how much of a waste of resources the experiment was (little did they know the signs replaced were at the end/beyond their useful life/due for replacement anyway). I am more than willing to admit I am wrong, but it just feels like a solution in search of a problem.

[billpa]

I guess what I'm confused about is this idea that the Clearview studies were all flawed (except the FHWA one).  Did the FHWA conclusively  prove that the prior studies were rigged in Clearview's favor?  Did anyone from Penn State, MIT, Texas A&M or TTI ever respond to that allegation?
It's been my observation (just an opinion) that a lot, not all, but a lot of the opposition to Clearview around here is based on nostalgia.
Something else I was wondering is why was the American (Gothic) font chosen in the first place?  Was it found to be the best available option or did it sort of just happen to be the choice of the people in charge at the time and was never really questioned?
Has the FHWA ever taken the time to review other fonts used around the world to see if they would be better, like what's used in the UK, for example?

[kalvado]

I guess what I'm confused about is this idea that the Clearview studies were all flawed (except the FHWA one).  Did the FHWA conclusively  prove that the prior studies were rigged in Clearview's favor?  Did anyone from Penn State, MIT, Texas A&M or TTI ever respond to that allegation?
It's been my observation (just an opinion) that a lot, not all, but a lot of the opposition to Clearview around here is based on nostalgia.
Something else I was wondering is why was the American (Gothic) font chosen in the first place?  Was it found to be the best available option or did it sort of just happen to be the choice of the people in charge at the time and was never really questioned?
Has the FHWA ever taken the time to review other fonts used around the world to see if they would be better, like what's used in the UK, for example?

I remember an MIT study, where IHMO less than impressive results, which I would interpret as "similar, maybe a little bit better, may be a bit worse" was concluded with "significantly improved, especially for certain age group" when entire difference was in one person reading the sign from a few feet larger distance. That shifted the average by a hair - and allowed to make a brave conclusion. But it looked more like guy learned how the experiment was set up and did things better on second try.
So, it becomes a matter of who is funding the study, glass may be half empty or half full. Psychology, in general, is suffering from the reproducibility crisis, and such studies may have same problem.

[Bobby5280]

I believe Clearview is more legible when compared to lettering of the same size set in the corresponding Series Gothic weight. But some of that difference has to do with Clearview's lowercase letters being larger and more open. I think the back and forth nonsense about granting Clearview "interim approval" then taking it away and later restoring it is all politics with various deciders just picking a typeface based on their own subjective bias.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something about the FHWA Series family that just feels official. Over-saturation due to how many road signs there are? Age of the typeface? Some combination of the two? In any case, I'm still of the camp "if it ain't broke don't fix it".

The effect of a typeface looking "official" is partly in the eye of the beholder and partly in the manner in how cleanly it is composed into a layout.

To me, no other typeface beats the "official" look than Helvetica (or its 80's revival Helvetica Neue). Helvetica was a tent pole of the Swiss school of typography and graphic design that took the design world by storm in the 1960's. There is a very good documentary about the typeface and its history. The popularity of Helvetica had started to wane in the late 1970's. Adobe gave Helvetica a boost in the early 1980's when they invented Postscript. Helvetica was one of the four default typefaces bundled into each Postscript interpreter. Helvetica was there when the desktop publishing revolution took off with the original Mac and Aldus PageMaker, the first page layout program built on Postscript technology.

Over the past 30 years Arial has arguably superseded Helvetica as the most "official" of official-looking fonts due to sheer availability on Windows-based computers and in Microsoft products. We also can't forget its name begins with the letter "A," putting it near the top of the font menu. Some designers are just too lazy to bother scrolling a little farther down a font menu list for a better choice. I hate how Arial looks. It looks similar to Helvetica but with lots of strange differences. Arial was created by Monotype for Microsoft, just so Microsoft wouldn't have to pay Linotype to license Helvetica.

"Highway Gothic" has plenty of its own flaws. They're really easy to see when compared directly to the far cleaner looking Interstate type family. Most of the weights of Series Gothic had no lowercase characters for the longest time; they were very bare-bones all caps fonts. When the lowercase characters were finally added they were not particularly well executed. The E/Modified weight was originally intended to hold reflective buttons. The typeface overall is too bold to make its lowercase characters properly legible. The negative spaces in those letters are too small. E/Modified still remains as the typeface of choice for big green signs due to style and nostalgia even though Series E is really more legible.

[PHLBOS]

I guess what I'm confused about is this idea that the Clearview studies were all flawed (except the FHWA one).  Did the FHWA conclusively  prove that the prior studies were rigged in Clearview's favor?  Did anyone from Penn State, MIT, Texas A&M or TTI ever respond to that allegation?

IIRC, it was a later (2014(?)) study from Texas A&M that alleged that the earlier findings that supported use of the Clearview font was based on inaccurately comparing older-worn signs in Highway Gothic to new Clearview signs; when the study should've compared new signs featuring each font.

Something else I was wondering is why was the American (Gothic) font chosen in the first place?

American Gothic lol? 



Sorry, I just had to do that. 

The E/Modified weight was originally intended to hold reflective buttons. The typeface overall is too bold to make its lowercase characters properly legible. The negative spaces in those letters are too small. E/Modified still remains as the typeface of choice for big green signs due to style and nostalgia even though Series E is really more legible.

That, in essence, was the reasoning why the IA only allowed the Clearview font to be used in certain applications.  However, many agencies (mis)applied such carte-blanche and in every direction.

[Bobby5280]

I think one of the reasons many agencies "mis-applied" the use of Clearview was because of the rule adopted last decade forbidding the use of all caps legends in many applications -like street name signs for instance. Clearview was designed from the outset with a complete basic character set. Most weights have "highway gothic" never had lowercase characters. Not every agency updated to "Series 2000" fonts, which included lowercase characters in more of the fonts. They were stuck with all caps versions. This figures in with municipalities adopting Clearview for their street name signs. Anyway, I think the design of lowercase characters in these Series 2000 fonts were not well done. I have several different flavors of "highway gothic" in my own collection; they all have much tighter default spacing than Clearview.

[DaBigE]

I believe Clearview is more legible when compared to lettering of the same size set in the corresponding Series Gothic weight. But some of that difference has to do with Clearview's lowercase letters being larger and more open. I think the back and forth nonsense about granting Clearview "interim approval" then taking it away and later restoring it is all politics with various deciders just picking a typeface based on their own subjective bias.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something about the FHWA Series family that just feels official. Over-saturation due to how many road signs there are? Age of the typeface? Some combination of the two? In any case, I'm still of the camp "if it ain't broke don't fix it".

The effect of a typeface looking "official" is partly in the eye of the beholder and partly in the manner in how cleanly it is composed into a layout.

To me, no other typeface beats the "official" look than Helvetica (or its 80's revival Helvetica Neue). Helvetica was a tent pole of the Swiss school of typography and graphic design that took the design world by storm in the 1960's. There is a very good documentary about the typeface and its history. The popularity of Helvetica had started to wane in the late 1970's. Adobe gave Helvetica a boost in the early 1980's when they invented Postscript. Helvetica was one of the four default typefaces bundled into each Postscript interpreter. Helvetica was there when the desktop publishing revolution took off with the original Mac and Aldus PageMaker, the first page layout program built on Postscript technology.

Over the past 30 years Arial has arguably superseded Helvetica as the most "official" of official-looking fonts due to sheer availability on Windows-based computers and in Microsoft products. We also can't forget its name begins with the letter "A," putting it near the top of the font menu. Some designers are just too lazy to bother scrolling a little farther down a font menu list for a better choice. I hate how Arial looks. It looks similar to Helvetica but with lots of strange differences. Arial was created by Monotype for Microsoft, just so Microsoft wouldn't have to pay Linotype to license Helvetica.

"Highway Gothic" has plenty of its own flaws. They're really easy to see when compared directly to the far cleaner looking Interstate type family. Most of the weights of Series Gothic had no lowercase characters for the longest time; they were very bare-bones all caps fonts. When the lowercase characters were finally added they were not particularly well executed. The E/Modified weight was originally intended to hold reflective buttons. The typeface overall is too bold to make its lowercase characters properly legible. The negative spaces in those letters are too small. E/Modified still remains as the typeface of choice for big green signs due to style and nostalgia even though Series E is really more legible.

I wish E Modified would have been ditched as soon as the buttons disappeared for similar legibility rationale. It's one of the reasons I disagree with the Clearview push, since I think modifications could have been made to the FHWA series. One thing I do like about Clearview is how it made the difference between a capital 'I' and a lowercase 'l' nearly impossible to mistake. Yes, the FHWA Series does have a clip taken out of the upper left corner of the 'l', but it's too subtle.

But I think Clearview could have left the numbers untouched; I didn't see anything wrong with FHWA's clarity. In fact, I prefer it, as the 6, 8, and 9 are easily distinguishable. Some other typefaces (Clearview isn't the worst, but it could be better), tighten the loop on the 9 and the 6, making them look similar to an 8 from a distance.

Since you're in the biz, what do you think should be done? Re-purpose some other existing typeface, fix FHWA Series' flaws, or create a new scientifically-based typeface? Personally, I wouldn't mind the last option, if and only if we could keep politics and private profits out of the system.

[vdeane]

I know the wider character set is the reason Québec adopted Clearview.  Creating accent marks with FHWA required workarounds, but with Clearview, they're built in.  Thankfully, Québec is one of the jurisdictions that is able to make it look decent.  British Columbia, on the other hand, is not - their Clearview signs look horrible, but their FHWA signs looked fine.

[seicer]

And Pennsylvania is hit or miss depending on what district is putting up the signs, regardless if its Clearview or not.

[PHLBOS]

I think one of the reasons many agencies "mis-applied" the use of Clearview was because of the rule adopted last decade forbidding the use of all caps legends in many applications -like street name signs for instance. Clearview was designed from the outset with a complete basic character set. Most weights have "highway gothic" never had lowercase characters. Not every agency updated to "Series 2000" fonts, which included lowercase characters in more of the fonts. They were stuck with all caps versions.

Oh I wouldn't necessarily say that agencies were stuck in all-caps when using highway Gothic.  Prior to the Series 2000 fonts; there were some FHWA-variations out there that were not Series E or E-modified.

These street-blade signs in NJ have been around since mid-90s.  The NJ 70-Marlton Ave sign has been there since the mid-90s.  I used to work nearby that intersection & remember that sign being erected.  The original McClellan Ave. streetblade sign erroneously read McClellen Ave..

This version of the lower-case s looks a lot better than the Series 2000 variant.

I wish E Modified would have been ditched as soon as the buttons disappeared for similar legibility rationale. It's one of the reasons I disagree with the Clearview push, since I think modifications could have been made to the FHWA series. One thing I do like about Clearview is how it made the difference between a capital 'I' and a lowercase 'l' nearly impossible to mistake. Yes, the FHWA Series does have a clip taken out of the upper left corner of the 'l', but it's too subtle.

Actually, and pointing toward NJ/NJDOT again some of their early post-button-copy BGS appeared to have used Series E lettering w/E-modified spacing (the earlier-mentioned Texas A&M study called this Enhanced E-modified). 

Example of NJDOT's use of what appears to be Enhanced Series E-modified

Compared to the conventional Series E-modified

When I first saw the former-example; it took me a while to pin-point the actual differences.  The style appeared the same but one was a little more crisp & discernible from a further distance.  That said, I agree with you that the use of E-enhanced for mixed-case lettering should've been dropped once button-copy was no longer offered/available.  Had such been done, and this was no doubt mentioned many posts back; there wouldn't have been a need for the Clearview font.

[Bobby5280]

Since you're in the biz, what do you think should be done? Re-purpose some other existing typeface, fix FHWA Series' flaws, or create a new scientifically-based typeface? Personally, I wouldn't mind the last option, if and only if we could keep politics and private profits out of the system.

Just like I won't do graphic design or illustration work for free just for the "honor" of being published no professional type designer in his right mind should be willing to properly design a new type family for traffic sign use "open source" and all free of charge. It takes a hell of a lot of time and effort to create a new typeface, even without all the extra steps of testing and research that went into Clearview. Any new effort is going to cost a bunch of money. Somebody somewhere has to be willing to pay for the time, labor (and materials) involved in that typeface's production -and any testing that follows.

I don't have as big a problem with Clearview's numbers as others in this forum. But I do prefer Series Gothic numerals in highway route markers, even if some of them are a bit crude looking. Font Bureau's Interstate family provides a pretty good road map of what could be done to clean up the glyphs. I think if the old Series Gothic typeface is to be maintained on highway signs it needs a proper, radical update in OpenType format. The existing characters need to be re-drawn, cleaning up all the odd little crooked bits that make the current version uglier than it needs to be. Then the character set needs to be expanded. First it needs a set of punctuation marks (whether they're allowed in the US or not). The typeface also needs a full set of accents and accented letters (regardless if they're allowed in the US or not). Series Gothic needs a proper set of OTF-enabled fractions. Clearview has a complete fraction set; unfortunately the fractions are taller than the capital M-height. Many agencies have had to make manual adjustments. Finally Series Gothic needs a full set of native small capital letters. Last decade the rule was established that cardinal direction words like "East" or "West" had to have large cap & small cap treatment. Currently highway sign designers have to type out words like "west" in all caps and then enlarge the first letter. That approach is GARBAGE. I really hate when I see that crap in commercial sign design (zero excuse for the practice there). The bigger first letter is out of balance with the other letters since its line strokes are proportionately thicker. There are hundreds of professional foundry quality OpenType fonts out there that have built in native small capitals and even many alternates to those small cap letters. The typeface Bookmania has over 3000 glyphs per font. It's staggering what went into that type family. I'm not expecting the fonts used on our highway signs to be quite that elaborate, but the fonts shouldn't be so embarrassingly out of date crude either.

[kalvado]

Since you're in the biz, what do you think should be done? Re-purpose some other existing typeface, fix FHWA Series' flaws, or create a new scientifically-based typeface? Personally, I wouldn't mind the last option, if and only if we could keep politics and private profits out of the system.

Just like I won't do graphic design or illustration work for free just for the "honor" of being published no professional type designer in his right mind should be willing to properly design a new type family for traffic sign use "open source" and all free of charge. It takes a hell of a lot of time and effort to create a new typeface, even without all the extra steps of testing and research that went into Clearview. Any new effort is going to cost a bunch of money. Somebody somewhere has to be willing to pay for the time, labor (and materials) involved in that typeface's production -and any testing that follows.

I don't have as big a problem with Clearview's numbers as others in this forum. But I do prefer Series Gothic numerals in highway route markers, even if some of them are a bit crude looking. Font Bureau's Interstate family provides a pretty road map of what could be done to clean up the glyphs. I think if the old Series Gothic typeface is to be maintained on highway signs it needs a proper, radical update in OpenType format. The existing characters need to be re-drawn, cleaning up all the odd little crooked bits that make the current version uglier than it needs to be. Then the character set needs to be expanded. First it needs a set of punctuation marks (whether they're allowed in the US or not). The typeface also needs a full set of accents and accented letters (regardless if they're allowed in the US or not). Series Gothic needs a proper set of OTF-enabled fractions. Clearview has a complete fraction set; unfortunately the fractions are taller than the capital M-height. Many agencies have had to make manual adjustments. Finally Series Gothic needs a full set of native small capital letters. Last decade the rule was established that cardinal direction words like "East" or "West" had to have large cap & small cap treatment. Currently highway sign designers have to type out words like "west" in all caps and then enlarge the first letter. That approach is GARBAGE. I really hate when I see that crap in commercial sign design (zero excuse for the practice there). The bigger first letter is out of balance with the other letters since its line strokes are proportionately thicker. There are hundreds of professional foundry quality OpenType fonts out there that have built in native small capitals and even many alternates to those small cap letters. The typeface Bookmania has over 3000 glyphs per font. It's staggering what went into that type family. I'm not expecting the fonts used on our highway signs to be quite that elaborate, but the fonts shouldn't be so embarrassingly out of date crude either.

Sort of tangential question - but how much would it cost to bring FHWA series up to speed?
I am thinking about it in terms of FHWA biting the bullet and paying one time for improvement - and getting exclusive (to be released to public domain, maybe with limitations) rights for such font. As far as I understand, cost will be fairly trivial for an agency which pays billions for bridges. And definitely cheaper than back and forth with ClearView

[Bobby5280]

How much would it cost to properly re-fresh the look and flesh-out the inadequacies of Series Gothic? The ballpark estimate would start at around $50,000 to $100,000. That's just for a type designer to spend the hundreds of hours needed to carefully redraw Series B thru F and expand the character sets. We're talking at least 450 or so glyphs per font file just to cover the Latin alphabet. Adding Greek and Cyrillic alphabets can double the glyph count. It's common for "pro" level OTF font files to have 700-1000 glyphs (if not a lot more than that). Drawing the characters is one thing. Building proper spacing tables into the font files is another. A single font file can have hundreds or even thousands of kerning pairs. The type designer may do the OpenType scripting work himself (to allow OTF functions like alternate characters, fractions, small caps, etc) or he may job it out to someone who specializes in that scripting. This is all just to arrive at working, finished font files.

The cost of testing is a whole other matter. This can be done using a bunch of different approaches, but it all involves making sign mock-ups. That stuff isn't exactly cheap, especially if you're going to make mock ups using the same retro-reflective vinyls used on the actual traffic signs. So that's going to add thousands, if not tens of thousands more to the price tag. If you have a team of people working and researching on this for an extended period of time the cost can really shoot up from there.

Then there's the matter of sign design software. As far as I can tell none of the traffic sign design specific software currently in use supports the extended features and character sets of OpenType. Even commercial sign design applications like SignLab and SAi Flexi don't fully support OpenType. The thing is OpenType technology was first developed in the mid-1990's and has been commercially available for about 20 years. I primarily use CorelDRAW 2018 and Adobe Illustrator CC for my sign design work. Those applications are far more sophisticated in their type handling capability. My artwork gets ported into other industry specific applications to send to vinyl cutters/plotters, routing tables and large format printers.

Anyway, not only does the Series Gothic typeface need to step into the 21st century, the dated software the sign designers are using needs to step into the 21st century as well.

As far as an open source angle goes, there is next to no one who will be willing to do it right (especially if politics are going to be kept out the equation) and arrive at a product freely available to the public. Google is really the only company that might be suited to tackling a project like re-vamping Series Gothic. They already subsidize a number of typeface projects to use in their open source Google Fonts collection. That sets them apart from Apple, who primarily licenses commercial typefaces like Helvetica or Avenir Next in Mac OSX and iOS. Google has its Maps and Earth applications. The company is actively involved in self-driving car technology. They would be able to eat a couple hundred grand worth of development costs (if not considerably more) without much problem if it means having bragging rights of putting a major contribution into the "official highway typeface." The big question is, "would they even want to do that?" Obviously someone would have to go to the trouble of selling Google on the idea.

[DaBigE]

Since you're in the biz, what do you think should be done? Re-purpose some other existing typeface, fix FHWA Series' flaws, or create a new scientifically-based typeface? Personally, I wouldn't mind the last option, if and only if we could keep politics and private profits out of the system.

Just like I won't do graphic design or illustration work for free just for the "honor" of being published no professional type designer in his right mind should be willing to properly design a new type family for traffic sign use "open source" and all free of charge. It takes a hell of a lot of time and effort to create a new typeface, even without all the extra steps of testing and research that went into Clearview. Any new effort is going to cost a bunch of money. Somebody somewhere has to be willing to pay for the time, labor (and materials) involved in that typeface's production -and any testing that follows.

I don't have as big a problem with Clearview's numbers as others in this forum. But I do prefer Series Gothic numerals in highway route markers, even if some of them are a bit crude looking. Font Bureau's Interstate family provides a pretty road map of what could be done to clean up the glyphs. I think if the old Series Gothic typeface is to be maintained on highway signs it needs a proper, radical update in OpenType format. The existing characters need to be re-drawn, cleaning up all the odd little crooked bits that make the current version uglier than it needs to be. Then the character set needs to be expanded. First it needs a set of punctuation marks (whether they're allowed in the US or not). The typeface also needs a full set of accents and accented letters (regardless if they're allowed in the US or not). Series Gothic needs a proper set of OTF-enabled fractions. Clearview has a complete fraction set; unfortunately the fractions are taller than the capital M-height. Many agencies have had to make manual adjustments. Finally Series Gothic needs a full set of native small capital letters. Last decade the rule was established that cardinal direction words like "East" or "West" had to have large cap & small cap treatment. Currently highway sign designers have to type out words like "west" in all caps and then enlarge the first letter. That approach is GARBAGE. I really hate when I see that crap in commercial sign design (zero excuse for the practice there). The bigger first letter is out of balance with the other letters since its line strokes are proportionately thicker. There are hundreds of professional foundry quality OpenType fonts out there that have built in native small capitals and even many alternates to those small cap letters. The typeface Bookmania has over 3000 glyphs per font. It's staggering what went into that type family. I'm not expecting the fonts used on our highway signs to be quite that elaborate, but the fonts shouldn't be so embarrassingly out of date crude either.

I never intended anyone to do the work for free, rather, it should be a project taken on (RE: paid for) by FHWA and/or TRB. I have no issue paying someone to do the work; I just have issues of a company profiting from something that everyone has to pay to be fully Federally-compliant (somewhat similar to what the RRFB system went through, albeit the RRFB was with patenting). Since it's for the US roadway system, I feel if the government sets the rules, they should also pick up the tab to do it right and, in theory, without bias.

Inadvertently, you hit on a few other gripes I have with the current series. The stroke width difference in cardinal directions is like nails on my OCD chalkboard. Although, I was thinking about it today, while passing a few such signs on my way back to the office after picking up our count equipment. At least on the independent route markers, from an artistic standpoint, the thicker capital letter does highlight the truly important bit of information on that sign plate. I think a lot of the visual issues like this are spawn from all the sign design programs being CAD-based, where many of the programs work with letter cells and not font families, in a way that Word or InDesign handle fonts. Making a letter taller is a simplistic x,y scaling rather than sourcing a different component of the font family.

Abominations like this are still scattered about Madison, but luckily, someone finally got them the 2000 series, and the signs are more palatable now.

[Bobby5280]

I never intended anyone to do the work for free, rather, it should be a project taken on (RE: paid for) by FHWA and/or TRB. I have no issue paying someone to do the work; I just have issues of a company profiting from something that everyone has to pay to be fully Federally-compliant (somewhat similar to what the RRFB system went through, albeit the RRFB was with patenting).

Did you know that most typeface designers are either designing type on a self-employed basis or as part of a very small business? There is not very many big companies involved with distributing commercial or even open-source typefaces. The big players are Adobe, Linotype and Monotype. They've gobbled up other major type foundries. Linotype acquired ITC. Monotype bought out Bitsream (and its MyFonts web site) and the FontFont foundry. Other notable foundries are still around, like House Industries and Letterhead fonts. Quite a few type designers and their company labels are literally one man shops. They gotta be able to make a freaking living.

I've personally spent thousands of dollars of my own money on commercial typefaces. I have a 100% legal license of Clearview Highway for instance (complete B & W weights set no less). That's on top of the thousands upon thousands my sign company has spent on the same thing. It's all part of the cost of doing business.

People routinely dump on Clearview Highway, but how many of them have bothered to check if Terminal Design in Brooklyn is some big bad giant corporation? It's really just a small business run by James Montalbano. It's nothing big and sinister. Does everyone expect that guy to work for nothing? Last time I checked he lives and/or works in Brooklyn. It's not cheap to live there, especially now since the whole damn borough has gone through gentrification and rounds of speculative real estate price gouging. If some company is going to distribute typefaces free to the public that company has to be willing to eat a whole lot of cost. Any such company isn't going to be willing to do that without some kind of money-making benefit on a related angle. That's why I bring up the scenario with Google. But for all I know Google might see a future where no road signs or highway markers are needed at all.

[MNHighwayMan]

People routinely dump on Clearview Highway, but how many of them have bothered to check if Terminal Design in Brooklyn is some big bad giant corporation? It's really just a small business run by James Montalbano. It's nothing big and sinister. Does everyone expect that guy to work for nothing? Last time I checked he lives and/or works in Brooklyn. It's not cheap to live there, especially now since the whole damn borough has gone through gentrification and rounds of speculative real estate price gouging.

It's his choice to live and work there. I'm personally not going to cry myself to sleep at night concerned about his welfare.

For reasons beyond subjective preference, I'm against Clearview because I don't like the idea of governments being beholden to pay a company for a license to use a highway sign font. That's where price gouging and government waste come in.

[kalvado]

People routinely dump on Clearview Highway, but how many of them have bothered to check if Terminal Design in Brooklyn is some big bad giant corporation? It's really just a small business run by James Montalbano. It's nothing big and sinister.

Regardless of actual business size, I would say any business which successfully lobbies to have federal laws change to favor their product is big and evil. Even if it is just a single nice guy who runs operations from his basement.

[Bobby5280]

For reasons beyond subjective preference, I'm against Clearview because I don't like the idea of governments being beholden to pay a company for a license to use a highway sign font. That's where price gouging and government waste come in.

So you do expect anyone commissioned to design a typeface used on highway signs to do the job for free to cut down on all that gub'ment waste? Do you expect anyone else doing work for the government to do that work for free? I've designed a hell of lot of signs for military posts in my region and other spots around the country. Am I supposed to be doing my job for free? Is it government waste for the US Army to hire a private sign company to do all that work? Or is the Army supposed to maintain its own damned sign shop?

I guarantee the people who designed the original Series Gothic typefaces didn't do that work for free. I guarantee Caltrans didn't help research and develop Series E Modified for free either. Somebody had to pay for that work.

I really suspect the main thing causing all the heartburn is Clearview Highway is a commercial typeface and it isn't legally available for free. Of course that hasn't stopped people from acquiring the font files without paying for them and even posting those files on this web site.

[DaBigE]

No one is suggesting the initial work should be done for free. It's the ongoing profits/royalties beyond the initial project cost that we object to.

[Bobby5280]

Most type designers don't get paid in advance for their work. Unless they're working full time on the staff of a company like Adobe or Linotype they're effectively self-employed. They only get paid based on how well their font files sell.

[DaBigE]

Most type designers don't get paid in advance for their work. Unless they're working full time on the staff of a company like Adobe or Linotype they're effectively self-employed. They only get paid based on how well their font files sell.

I'm not seeing your point. I don't get paid in advance for my engineering projects; surgeons don't get paid in advance of an appendectomy. One would think they would jump at the chance at contract work, as for the most part, it's a guaranteed paycheck.

[jakeroot]

If any sort of typeface designed for roadways were to become public-domain (and therefore licence-free), wouldn't the work on the typeface have to be paid up-front? Perhaps the design team given permanent positions within the FHWA (if they so chose)?

As far as I can tell, Clearview works like every other non-free font, where the designers are paid according to how many licences are given out (right?). But because the font is used on road signs, the typeface really should be public domain, so no licencing crap. Ergo, up-front payment is the only option.

[machias]

Syracuse, N.Y. had mixed case Series D on their street blade signs in the 70s, and it looked pretty much identical to the mixed case Series D used on by Georgia on their BGSes for all those years (but not that squared off "D"). Truth be known, I find mixed case Series D (specifically "Georgia D" to be far superior to both Series E modified and Clearview). It's a shame that GDOT has abandoned the practice. The mixed case Series D as shown in the MUTCD and used by plenty of DOTs is not great, the "s" and the "w" are particularly awful. The GDOT version of Series D is much, much better.

As a resident of Illinois where there's plenty of Clearview, when used properly (mixed case legend for destinations) it looks pretty good. The numerals are a mess and plenty of folks messed up how the lettering is suppose to do be used, but when used properly it's not bad. I still find Georgia D superior though.

Series E modified should have been dropped when button copy was dropped. Instead they should have put more emphasis on using Series E but with Series E modified letter spacing. That looks awesome and doesn't suffer from nearly as much halation at night.

[Scott5114]

Over the past 30 years Arial has arguably superseded Helvetica as the most "official" of official-looking fonts due to sheer availability on Windows-based computers and in Microsoft products. We also can't forget its name begins with the letter "A," putting it near the top of the font menu. Some designers are just too lazy to bother scrolling a little farther down a font menu list for a better choice. I hate how Arial looks. It looks similar to Helvetica but with lots of strange differences. Arial was created by Monotype for Microsoft, just so Microsoft wouldn't have to pay Linotype to license Helvetica.

I disagree with Arial looking official. To me, it screams "Ed from Accounting was tired of people not changing the bottle in the water cooler so he made this sign and tried to make it look official so he used the font from his spreadsheets." That and it looks like a cheap knock-off of Helvetica.

"Highway Gothic" has plenty of its own flaws. They're really easy to see when compared directly to the far cleaner looking Interstate type family.

Seems like a lot of road sign fonts have some typographic flaws, which makes sense because they're usually designed by engineers and not by graphic designers. When I was doing research on my Trafikkalfabetet digitization project, I found a few articles of typography snobs criticizing it for various things, some of which they had a point on (like the fact that the tittles on i and j are far too small for the character body) and some that are nitpicky.

"Highway Gothic" has plenty of its own flaws. [...] When the lowercase characters were finally added they were not particularly well executed. The E/Modified weight was originally intended to hold reflective buttons.

I agree with this too. The official spec, which I refer to in my posts as "vanilla Series D" (or whichever), has very awkward lowercase letterforms. The older, unofficial lowercase letterforms that were used by agencies like Iowa DOT (which I like to call "chocolate Series D") are much more palatable.

E/Modified still remains as the typeface of choice for big green signs due to style and nostalgia even though Series E is really more legible.

Transportation research seems to be following this line of thought, so we may well end up with Series E on guide signs soon. Recent research has shown that "Enhanced E Modified" (Series E, but using E(M) spacing tables) performed better than Clearview or Series E(M).

How much would it cost to properly re-fresh the look and flesh-out the inadequacies of Series Gothic? The ballpark estimate would start at around $50,000 to $100,000. That's just for a type designer to spend the hundreds of hours needed to carefully redraw Series B thru F and expand the character sets. We're talking at least 450 or so glyphs per font file just to cover the Latin alphabet. Adding Greek and Cyrillic alphabets can double the glyph count. It's common for "pro" level OTF font files to have 700-1000 glyphs (if not a lot more than that). Drawing the characters is one thing. Building proper spacing tables into the font files is another. A single font file can have hundreds or even thousands of kerning pairs. The type designer may do the OpenType scripting work himself (to allow OTF functions like alternate characters, fractions, small caps, etc) or he may job it out to someone who specializes in that scripting. This is all just to arrive at working, finished font files.

[...]

Then there's the matter of sign design software. As far as I can tell none of the traffic sign design specific software currently in use supports the extended features and character sets of OpenType. Even commercial sign design applications like SignLab and SAi Flexi don't fully support OpenType. The thing is OpenType technology was first developed in the mid-1990's and has been commercially available for about 20 years. I primarily use CorelDRAW 2018 and Adobe Illustrator CC for my sign design work. Those applications are far more sophisticated in their type handling capability. My artwork gets ported into other industry specific applications to send to vinyl cutters/plotters, routing tables and large format printers.

Anyway, not only does the Series Gothic typeface need to step into the 21st century, the dated software the sign designers are using needs to step into the 21st century as well.

You have posted variants of this several times, but I have never been able to pin you down on why exactly the FHWA fonts need all of those glyphs. One could argue that French and Spanish diacritics are necessary, but it's hard to see how anything else would be a good use of funds, particularly since the US doesn't share a land border with any country that uses Cyrillic or Greek script. Additionally, most of the Unicode spec that lacks coverage is things like advanced mathematical symbols, obscure currency symbols, and emoji, all of which make sense for a general-purpose typeface to include, but have no traffic-control value.

It could be argued that some features like typographic ligatures could be useful, but I'd want to see studies showing that "ff" is more legible than "ff" before it appeared on signs. Although this is of questionable benefit if the features aren't supported by the software anyway.

Perhaps before another project like Clearview is undertaken, studies should be done comparing FHWA Series to other established road sign fonts like Transport, Trafikkalfabetet, and DIN 1451. If one of those is already more legible, we could get the benefits for free.

If any sort of typeface designed for roadways were to become public-domain (and therefore licence-free), wouldn't the work on the typeface have to be paid up-front? Perhaps the design team given permanent positions within the FHWA (if they so chose)?

As far as I can tell, Clearview works like every other non-free font, where the designers are paid according to how many licences are given out (right?). But because the font is used on road signs, the typeface really should be public domain, so no licencing crap. Ergo, up-front payment is the only option.

Anything developed in house by the federal government is automatically public domain. One can also choose to void their own copyright on a work and make it public domain by themselves.

Interestingly, current court precedent is that while typefaces are copyrightable as works of software, and their names are subject to trademark protection, glyphs are not protected at all, because they aren't original enough (the courts find that an "A" is just an "A" no matter how you draw it, and you can't copyright an "A"). This is why you can find shoddy copies of typefaces like Optima that have been renamed to things like "Oklahoma" or "Optimum".

So really, all that would have to be done is to have someone at FHWA redraw Clearview and release the files under a name like "New FHWA Series D" or something. This may not meet ethics requirements, though, despite being regularly done in the private sector.

[vdeane]

I imagine if FHWA were to decide to update the FHWA fonts, it would go something like this:
1. The FHWA would release a Request for Proposals (RFP) detailing the issue, the stated objectives of the project, and a desired timeframe/budget for completion.
2. Contractors would respond to the RFP with detailed proposals giving an overview of what they'd do; qualification details for their firm and any subcontractor(s) as well as staff working on the project, including resumes and summaries of prior related work; and a detailed proposed schedule and budget.
3. The FHWA would review the proposals, potentially interview firms, and decide who to award the contract to.
4. The contractor would work on the project, billing the FHWA as the work progresses.
5. A final product would be delivered to the FHWA and the contract would be closed out.