Finally got a few free days to work my way through the first season of Dexter. I found it compelling, entertaining, and fairly original—but caught a few slip-ups here and there.
Case in point: as Dex rolls through some old microfilm, he comes across a newspaper headline allegedly from 1973. Unfortunately, it’s written in a typeface that wasn’t created until 1982.
Last week, I got in (or rather, lost) an Internet fight with Merlin Mann. He talked up the virtues of his lovely new typeface. I decided to be a jackass and mocked him for spending $200 on what is essentially a free font.
It was a ludicrous allegation on my part—while I could indeed care less about the character sets, the subtle differences in glyphs (the tail on the a, t and capital R are the most important, for my money) are quite significant. Above all else, Clarendon is a notorious space hog and essentially unusable in text sizes at screen resolution in its standard weight.
What I should have said was that Sentinel is a $200 Georgia, because if you look at Kung-Fu Grippe, chances are pretty damn good that’s the font you’re going to find. @font-face, the most straightforward and elegant way of ensuring your visitors see the font you want them to see, cannot be used with the vast majority of typefaces, due to licensing restrictions.
Call it the Shallow Hal effect: web designers pick a font they love, and it makes their site look great. But for visitors don’t who already have the font installed on their computer—in the case of Sentinel, just about everyone—it just looks like the same tired set of typefaces on every other website.
The sad thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of good looking open-source fonts out there (such as the one on top of this page) and plenty of interesting ways to style them with CSS3.
Granted, it’s not a full set of weights, obliques and character sets, but you can console yourself that any visitors not using IE6 (or—for now—MobileSafari) will see your type the way you meant it to be seen.
And it won’t cost you $200.
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.
