The Federal Highway Administration (FHA) announced earlier this year they were removing their earlier approval of Clearview, a font that has had provisional acceptance by the government for over a decade. It had joined Highway Gothic as an acceptable road sign font. The Department of Transportation even Tweeted about it last month:
Safer like this or like this? @USDOTFHWA data says the #font matters. https://t.co/lBZ31PM7SX pic.twitter.com/b3sFYj1OkJ— TransportationGov (@USDOT) February 4, 2016
Subtle, yet different enough to those who get asthmatic over font styles.
Exactly why Clearview was rejected after a decade of use, well, no one is entirely certain--but somehow in some back alley, where BIG FONT money is being doled out, the government wants do to away with the letters.
For years, studies from Penn State and Texas A&M suggested Clearview improved legibility of highway signs and, thus, improved driving safety. The longer, thinner letters fairly ubiquitous in the twenty states that have already adopted the font can increase signage awareness by up to 12%, according to one study. For a person driving 70mph, as Wired notes, that's 74ft of added reaction time. And as studies tend to do, other follow-ups said the difference was actually only negligible. Sigh.
The FHA claims they don't want to force states to adopt the licensing fee that comes with adopting the font. Meeker and Associates, the creative firm that developed the font in the 1990s, charges a one-time fee of $800 for lifetime use of the design, which will clearly cripple any state that relies off a piggy bank for its state funding. Donald Meeker, founder of the firm, finds it fairly incredulous that a state can't afford $800 in its annual budget.
"It’s a shame for the states," Meeker tells Wired. "Everybody knows [the old typeface] looks like a dog’s lunch."
Whoa. You know things just got serious when Alpo gets slammed.
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