So,
you’re planning a road trip across the United States.
Well, you’ll definitely need this.
And this.
And maybe this.
You might see this.
Or even this.
But, mostly,
you’ll see a lot of these.
These signs tell you where to go, or where you are.
But most of them have something else in common.
Their typeface.
Highway Gothic is carefully composed to guide you to your destination,
without distracting you.
But for the past decade, another typeface has been trying to take its place.
Highway Gothic was created in 1948,
right around the time highways started criss-crossing the United States.
It came out of an initiative of the California Department of Transportation,
to develop a clearer and more legible standard for highway signs.
Of the 6 fonts, or variations, they developed,
this version became the highway standard.
The spacing is specified to be quite loose,
and that's something that is a big help when viewing at very long distances.
Those angle tops to the letters that you see in the L and T.
That was the solution that appeared in Highway Gothic to differentiate shapes.
It becomes important in states like Illinois where you have capital i and lowercase L’s
and you need to be unambiguous about what's what
Soon after its creation, every highway in America was plastered with Highway Gothic.
But by the late 1980s, with the introduction of new reflective sign materials,
Highway Gothic started to have problems.
Specifically with something called halation.
Halation is when light spreads beyond its proper boundaries, creating a halo effect.
It’s that glow you see around a bright object on a tv screen.
Like in this scene in Once upon a time in Hollywood.
Right there in the upper right
Elderly drivers, specifically, were having trouble reading these signs at night,
as lowercase letters like E, A and S started blurring into O’s
The counter of the E – that's really very tight there.
Even before you point a headlight at it at night,
even in broad daylight, that would blur together.
But by this time, a potential solution was on its way.
By the end of the 90s, font designers and a crew of researchers
from Penn State and 3M had created
the second typeface we see on highway signs: Clearview.
At first glance, Clearview and Highway Gothic look pretty similar.
But when you look closer, you can see how different they really are.
In decisions like the counter of the A and the counter of the E,
those internal spaces are made much larger.
The curves of the A and U they trend towards this kind of squarish shape.
And I suspect that was done to further reinforce the enlargement of these internal shapes.
Highway Gothic stumbles quite a lot.
If you take a close look at the lower case S, it does seem like one side of the curve
is arguing with the other as it goes through that pretty
complex track that it has to follow to be an S.
Clearview tries to fix that, by widening the spaces.
Opening up these letters can help mitigate the problem of halation.
And during testing, Clearview showed a 16% improvement
in recognition over highway gothic at night.
Which meant that drivers that were driving at 60mph
would have an extra 1 to 2 seconds
to make a decision based on sign information
In 2004, the Federal Highway Administration granted interim approval
for Clearview to be used on an optional basis,
mostly when old signs needed to be replaced
Around 30 states adopted Clearview in some form.
The resulting mix of signs has caused some confusion,
and further studies have called into question Clearview’s improved legibility.
specifically on lighter colored signs, and it’s more stylized number forms.
One study from Texas A&M in 2014 found that Clearview’s legibility
was “not statistically different” than Highway Gothic’s
I think in purely mechanical I would say Clearview is more successful
because it does create a more even texture than highway gothic.
There's something very distinctly American about Highway Gothic
and it is a bit blunt and stumbling and loud
and clearview is almost in that respect too polished.
Today, the FHWA still allows the use of Clearview in some cases,
but they “make no recommendation or endorsement of the Clearview letter style”
Which means if you go out on the highway right now — there’s a mix.
Two fonts that, ultimately, do the job they’re designed to do.
Get you where you’re going, with the least confusion.