Create Awesome

About a month ago, I made a 14-hour drive to North Carolina, and got my first view of some Clearview signage in the wild. Here’s a fairly comprehensive background story if you have no idea what I’m talking about.

While I admit it’s (much) easier to read, I can’t say I’m exactly psyched about seeing it. There are a variety of reasons why. I suppose my gut reaction is that it no longer feels like I’m driving down a federally-funded expressway—it feels like I’m staring at ads. 

While I’ve mentioned that Interstate has really picked up its public profile recently, Interstate isn’t really the FHWA typeface. Tobias Frere-Jones got a lot of attention for Interstate because the edits he made were very subtle, yet somehow made the font tolerable for more than 12 characters at a time.

Clearview, on the other hand, was in use for advertising years before it ever appeared along the highway—most notably by megalith AT&T. I liked the old, ugly FWHA face because it was so odd and idiosyncratic. It was like watching a David Bowie in his “androgynous alien” days—no mistaking it for anything else, let alone a sweeping corporate rebranding. 

FWHA’s cold formlessness was also nice because it didn’t encourage you to interact. One of Steve Jobs’ most persistent design maxims is that products need to be anthropomorphic; it makes people want to engage with them. 

Clearview is definitely more human than FHWA, but is that really a good thing? Do we really want people relating to and engaging with signage? Or do we want them to glance, comprehend, and get their eyes back on the road?

I’m also skeptical of the notion that legibility should be the only standard. Reading interstate signage—even with the old, weird FHWA face—is pretty damn easy. If you need the extra 200 feet to pick out an exit, what other details are you missing? Should you really be on the road? 

I’m a fairly serious philosophical proponent of the notion that a certain level of difficulty makes the system better for everyone. I won’t even touch the issue of whether or not more-legible signs make it easier for drivers to speed or drive recklessly.

Finally, on an observational note, all that stuff in the Times article about signs being designed for content from the ground up is total fluff. At least half the Clearview signs I saw had the same unbalanced margins and sloppy layout as every other Interstate sign. I just don’t think custom-cutting giant slabs of steel for every new rest stop in the name of good design is a time- or cost- effective method of production. 

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t hate the new signs, and I think they’ll work just fine. If you’ve got a sign that needs replacing, by all means, replace it with Clearview—most people won’t even notice the difference.

But I just don’t think adopting a new typeface for the nation’s highways is the world-changing development many have made it out to be—either in terms of safety or design.