Street Blade Signs Changing (All Uppercase > Mixed Case)?

[brownpelican]

Apologies for bumping this thread, but unincorporated Saint Tammany Parish is replacing their old and faded blades with this:





And this was found at the entrance to a private business near Folsom:





Finally, this is what you'll see in Baton Rouge...unless you come across the illuminated Clearview blades (yes, the shot is a few years old):

[Takumi]

I've seen a few mixed case blades appearing in Petersburg recently. Before that, they had gone from semi-mixed (all caps but the first letter was bigger) to all caps.

[brownpelican]

Apologies for bumping this, but I've found new blades in my area:

My town (ugly as hell if you ask me):





Independence, LA (installed earlier this month):





Hammond, LA have had these blades for a while now:



Southeastern Louisiana University use these blades...some need replacing.

[TheStranger]

Don't have a photo yet, but saw a mixed-case San Francisco streetblade for Eucalyptus Drive (off of Route 1/19th Avenue) last week.  Totally stands out when the "Street name in all caps, rarely street type" look has been so much a part of the SF signing aesthetic for years.

[agentsteel53]

Don't have a photo yet, but saw a mixed-case San Francisco streetblade for Eucalyptus Drive (off of Route 1/19th Avenue) last week.  Totally stands out when the "Street name in all caps, rarely street type" look has been so much a part of the SF signing aesthetic for years.

is this a new replacement trend, or is this just a one-off?

[TheStranger]

Don't have a photo yet, but saw a mixed-case San Francisco streetblade for Eucalyptus Drive (off of Route 1/19th Avenue) last week.  Totally stands out when the "Street name in all caps, rarely street type" look has been so much a part of the SF signing aesthetic for years.

is this a new replacement trend, or is this just a one-off?

I saw a couple of new mixed-case street blades in unincorporated Sacramento (at Folsom & Watt south of US 50) a few months ago so...I'll have to keep looking and see if more of these pop up there and in SF.

[flowmotion]

Don't have a photo yet, but saw a mixed-case San Francisco streetblade for Eucalyptus Drive (off of Route 1/19th Avenue) last week.  Totally stands out when the "Street name in all caps, rarely street type" look has been so much a part of the SF signing aesthetic for years.

is this a new replacement trend, or is this just a one-off?

Mixed case signs are popping up in different places, so it looks like a trend. I saw one on Diamond Heights Blvd and a couple in Golden Gate Park. Haven't had a chance to grab a pic yet either.

[CentralCAroadgeek]

Although not new installations, I've always liked street blades in the city of Santa Cruz:

[Scott5114]

That is a very tasteful design, though I don't like the practice of having two back-to-back blades posted for each street. It looks worse to my eyes and I'm sure it's more expensive since you're using twice as much metal.  Oklahoma City did that for a while and fortunately seems to have stopped it.

[Alps]

That is a very tasteful design, though I don't like the practice of having two back-to-back blades posted for each street. It looks worse to my eyes and I'm sure it's more expensive since you're using twice as much metal.  Oklahoma City did that for a while and fortunately seems to have stopped it.

One sheet works if your sign blades are structural enough so that the upper one can sit on the lower one, which in turn sits on top of the pole. I can't see this being much of a problem, seeing as how metal is hard.

[Scott5114]

That is a very tasteful design, though I don't like the practice of having two back-to-back blades posted for each street. It looks worse to my eyes and I'm sure it's more expensive since you're using twice as much metal.  Oklahoma City did that for a while and fortunately seems to have stopped it.

One sheet works if your sign blades are structural enough so that the upper one can sit on the lower one, which in turn sits on top of the pole. I can't see this being much of a problem, seeing as how metal is hard.

Yeah, Norman doesn't have any problem with it whatsoever. (They use flat sheet aluminum, too, not the thicker I-beam-shaped blades that some cities use.)

[Alps]

That is a very tasteful design, though I don't like the practice of having two back-to-back blades posted for each street. It looks worse to my eyes and I'm sure it's more expensive since you're using twice as much metal.  Oklahoma City did that for a while and fortunately seems to have stopped it.

One sheet works if your sign blades are structural enough so that the upper one can sit on the lower one, which in turn sits on top of the pole. I can't see this being much of a problem, seeing as how metal is hard.

Yeah, Norman doesn't have any problem with it whatsoever. (They use flat sheet aluminum, too, not the thicker I-beam-shaped blades that some cities use.)

I thought about the I-beam point, but realized that that won't do a thing for the vertical stability of the sign - it would still buckle right down the middle. You'd need vertical bracing, and since signs haven't used that before, no reason why they need to now.

[Brian556]

Using two single-faced signs per street is a very reliable way to prevent sign loss by theft or wind damage. It is virtually impossible for vandals to remove them.
The "I-beam", more commonly known as "extruded" sign blade, is stronger and prevents bending by strong winds. It is stronger at the points that the brackets attach to.
This is also very helpful in preventing theft, because juveniles will typically put their body weight on the sign, and cause the aluminum to break around the post cap bracket.

[HighwayMaster]

Plain Township near Canton has no idea what they are doing. Their new blades have only the first letter of the street name capitalized; everything else, including the road type and "NW" or "NE" is lowercase. So here's what you get: "Schneider st ne". Not "Schneider St NE".

[Scott5114]

Plain Township near Canton has no idea what they are doing. Their new blades have only the first letter of the street name capitalized; everything else, including the road type and "NW" or "NE" is lowercase. So here's what you get: "Schneider st ne". Not "Schneider St NE".

Writing in all caps is certainly useful as a way of masking someone's inability to capitalize properly.

[PurdueBill]

Plain Township near Canton has no idea what they are doing. Their new blades have only the first letter of the street name capitalized; everything else, including the road type and "NW" or "NE" is lowercase. So here's what you get: "Schneider st ne". Not "Schneider St NE".

I can hear it now.....someone saying "well, they said that the Feds want only the first letter capitalized so that's what I did!"  Sigh.

The only way those signs could be better* is if they are in Comic Sans or the "Slow down my daddy/mommy works here" lettering.  They aren't, are they?

*by "better", I mean "worse"

[citrus]

Don't have a photo yet, but saw a mixed-case San Francisco streetblade for Eucalyptus Drive (off of Route 1/19th Avenue) last week.  Totally stands out when the "Street name in all caps, rarely street type" look has been so much a part of the SF signing aesthetic for years.

is this a new replacement trend, or is this just a one-off?

Mixed case signs are popping up in different places, so it looks like a trend. I saw one on Diamond Heights Blvd and a couple in Golden Gate Park. Haven't had a chance to grab a pic yet either.

I was in SF last weekend and saw a whole slew of mixed-case signs, mostly in the Marina area. They looked strange to me, bu they weren't outlandish. No pics from me either

[flowmotion]

fyi: Eric Fischer has a bunch of the new style SF signs posted on his Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/

[CentralCAroadgeek]

Just saw those new SF street blades, they do look strange. It looks way better in all caps.

[mjb2002]

Yesterday, I saw two new mixed-case street name sign blades in Barnwell County - one of which is to the east of my high school alma mater (Williston-Elko) at Main & Clemson Streets.

Also saw three new mixed-case destination signs, including one at the same general location.

[citrus]

Here's a blog post about the mixed-case San Francisco signs. http://40goingon28.blogspot.com/2012/06/street-sign-apocalypse.html
It's attracting non-roadgeek attention!

[bulkyorled]

These are some of my favorite, which coincidentally, 4/5 of them are the cities closest to me.
Calabasas, Burbank, Los Angeles, San Fernando, and Glendale. (kind of a rip off on the San Francisco ones) they're all rather simple but bold in my opinion. The green burbank ones aren't like the other green ones I see where it's just a bland flimsy strip. These got some oomph to them haha The San Fernando signs are part of a larger collection of pictures I took of all the designs that exist of San Fernando, and the San Jose was just a coincidence...
Even the newer ones here are mostly lowercase, San Fernando just got new ones recently within the past 2 years and they're all upper case but a few old ones still exist and they were all lowercase.

Opinions on them?

[myosh_tino]

Is it just me or do the letters in the new mixed-case San Francisco street blades appear more crammed than the all-caps blades?  If that's how San Francisco is going to implement mixed case blades, then they should just go back to all-caps because I can't see how the legibility of the new blades with their compressed character spacing is any better that the existing all-caps blades. I'm not entirely why I saw the mixed-case blades as being compressed but after taking a look at the flickr link in a previous post, I'll withdraw my comment about the compressed blades.  However, to my eye, I think the street names on the new mixed-case blades are too small and would be hard to read from a distance due to the introduction of lowercase letters.  Perhaps this is because San Francisco chose to use Series D (I think)... Series E or E(M) might have been a better choice.

On a personal note, I am quite surprised that San Francisco is actually implementing this requirement from the 2009 MUTCD.  At least they didn't change the blade color to a boring green!

[Scott5114]

Why bother complying with the MUTCD color or capitalization requirements if you're just going to violate it by using a stupid font?

[Central Avenue]

Why do places that use Helvetica for street signs always seem to compress it? I wouldn't mind it otherwise, but type-stretching is just ugly.