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The Feds' Freeway Font Flip-Flop (citylab.com)
McGruber writes: Citylab has the news that the U.S. Federal Highway Administration is revoking its 2004 approval of the "Clearview" font for road signs. Clearview was made to improve upon its predecessor, a 1940s font called Highway Gothic. Certain letters appeared to pose visibility problems, especially those with tight interstices (or internal spacing)—namely lowercase e, a, and s. At night, any of these reflective letters might appear to be a lowercase o in the glare of headlights. By opening up these letterforms, and mixing lowercase and uppercase styles, Clearview aimed to improve how these reflective highway signs read.
Now, just 12 years later, the FHWA is reversing itself: "After more than a decade of analysis, we learned—among other things—that Clearview actually compromises the legibility of signs in negative-contrast color orientations, such as those with black letters on white or yellow backgrounds like Speed Limit and Warning signs," said Doug Hecox, a FHWA spokesperson, in an email. The FHWA has not yet provided any research on Clearview that disproves the early claims about the font's benefits. But there is at least one factor that clearly distinguishes it from Highway Gothic: cost. Jurisdictions that adopt Clearview must purchase a standard license for type, a one-time charge of between $175 (for one font) and $795 (for the full 13-font typeface family) and up, depending on the number of workstations.
That doesn't seems like a very good use of tax money, for something that can be nondestructively reused once created.
Now, just 12 years later, the FHWA is reversing itself: "After more than a decade of analysis, we learned—among other things—that Clearview actually compromises the legibility of signs in negative-contrast color orientations, such as those with black letters on white or yellow backgrounds like Speed Limit and Warning signs," said Doug Hecox, a FHWA spokesperson, in an email. The FHWA has not yet provided any research on Clearview that disproves the early claims about the font's benefits. But there is at least one factor that clearly distinguishes it from Highway Gothic: cost. Jurisdictions that adopt Clearview must purchase a standard license for type, a one-time charge of between $175 (for one font) and $795 (for the full 13-font typeface family) and up, depending on the number of workstations.
That doesn't seems like a very good use of tax money, for something that can be nondestructively reused once created.
switch to an open source font.
.. and very pro capitalism, etc bla bla.
But ... common ... how can our Federal Highway Administration go about researching and the setting a standard for a font ... and then be so stupid as to not procure rights to that font and then license them to every other agency/company at no cost?
As a republican ... this is the kind of thing I expect my government TO do. I know wikipedia says "It was developed by independent researchers with the help of the Texas Transportation Institute and the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, under the supervision of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)," why didn't any of these agencies say "So ... we're going to pay you a huge pile of money ... once ... for this font."
END
Why is the government licensing a font from a commercial vendor? Wouldn't a more cost effective approach be to have one designed as a work for hire so they own the copyright making it public domahttp://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/02/01/199201/the-feds-freeway-font-flip-flop#in (since the public is paying for it).
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
True, but it's a relatively small amount of money. It's not completely out of whack with what commercial enterprises pay for non-free fonts. And, to be honest, if someone invested in this project thinking "Hmm, if I invest on research into improving something with a direct affect on road safety and transportation efficiency, I'll make money!" that's... not a bad thing. Beats "Hmm, if I invest in research on blowing people up, the government will give me money!" anyway.
Copyright isn't a terrible idea, just one that's abused from time to time. The target audience for this font can easily afford the money they're asking for, and it's a worthy product if the font does what it's designed to do. (Whether that's true is a separate issue from "Should we occasionally pay for fonts?")
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I've been told that 3D printing will 3D print the future and only Luddites don't agree.
Those prices are down right cheap. some fonts are $1000/per use one billboard is a use, one street sign is a use. But cumulatively it adds up to a whole lot of money for tax payers.
So lets agree there are two dimensions to this argument whether the Clearview font is superior which is the bulk of the article and whether the flame bait trailing paragraph means that we need to fix the economics.
Designing a font is a lot more work than you think if your goal is something legible unlike say Comic Sans. Designers should be compensated. I like to be paid for my work. It lets me eat. But the royalty model is perhaps broken. Alternatively the price is broken... There are many municipal sign shops unlike printers... probably be just Google and Apple licensing fonts for print production in the near future after they take over the remnants of Xerox. So street sign fonts should maybe be $1 to many municipalities while print (dead tree type) fonts should maybe be $2mil per licensee? Or perhaps better the government could have commissioned the font and then provided it to any municipality.
As to the merits of Clearview? I think the font is too light in the default weight. I have no research to back this up just 10yrs of gut experience. It does not exist in weights suitable for street name signs... which makes me leery of suggesting it to my municipality for use. It does have more open vowel glyphs and as such is an improvement over the Highway Gothic, though most people do not read character glyph at a time while driving... they look for word outlines, so perhaps that doesn't matter. Then again my mother slows down to read highway signs because she has trouble with is that an 'e' or an 'o'.
My thoughts? The Obama administration could do worse with its money than running a design a replacement highway font contest. Prize: $100,000, 2nd and 3rd runners up $30,000 and $15,000 but the font must be made available license free within the US at least. Have Google Manage distribution and grant $1,000,000 to PennDOT to test. (Unlike other DOT's PennDot can actually do this work... don't ask me about DOT's in the South wow... just wow...)
Have gnu, will travel.
That doesn't seems like a very good use of tax money, for something that can be nondestructively reused once created.
You must be new here. Par for the course. "But without the government, who would build the roads???"
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Yes, now those signs need changing. Cronies across the country rejoice!
The work would cost a bit for research but would cut costs nation wide and we all would benefit from it. (except people making money from selling the font) Or get in conjunction with other nations that use the Roman alphabet and work on it together for a global free standard. Paying for fonts seems dumb.
Anything that could be done to make "North" look very different from a distance than "South" on Interstate on-ramp signs would be very welcome in my book. I've always thought making the first letter much bigger would be nice. "East" versus "West" isn't quite as bad, but still, the last two letters are the same.
Per fucking workstation. And this rip-off has been going on for how many years?
Jurisdictions that adopt Clearview must purchase a standard license for type, a one-time charge of between $175 (for one font) and $795 (for the full 13-font typeface family) and up, depending on the number of workstations.
That doesn't seems like a very good use of tax money, for something that can be nondestructively reused once created.
To install a sign:
All costs listed are for a complete sign assembly in place, including all legend, fabricating, transportation, labor, hardware, and painting of posts.
Sign panels:
Regulatory/Warning/Marker: $15 to 18 / sq.ft.
Large Guide Signs: $20 to 25 / sq.ft.
Electronic Variable Message Sign: $50,000 to $150,000 each.
Sign Posts:
U-Channel: $125 to $200 each
Square Tube (Telespar): $10 to $15 per foot
Large Steel Breakaway Posts: $15 to $30 per foot
Cantilever Sign: $15,000 to $20,000 each
Sign Bridge: $30,000 to $60,000 each
Foundations:
Square Tube: $150 - $250 each
Breakaway Post: $250 to $750 each
Cantilever / Bridge: $6,000 - $7,000 each
STOP signs are considered among the most expensive signs. Due to their critical importance in intersection safety, they must be replaced as soon as is reasonably feasible - even if that means driving 300+ miles round trip at 3 AM, at $1.00 per mile for the truck, and $25-$40 per hour overtime for each sign crewperson. Taking this into account, a simple $75 STOP sign suddenly becomes a $500+ item.
Engineering costs with respect to signing are more difficult to define. If a 3 month study results in installation of only 3 signs, it may not be equitable to charge the whole egineering cost to those installations. Normally, engineering costs are treated separately, but if there is a need to take them into account, then a rule of thumb estimate is engineering cost = 10% to 15% of construction cost.
Costs of Traffic Signs
This is just another unfunded Federal mandate to force states to squander precious taxpayer money to well-connected interests in BIG FONT.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm disappointed, I wanted to find out more about whats going on the the Japanese TV and film industry.
Font designers are just too precious over how much their tiny design differences actually matter.
Take as an example Arial vs. Helvetica. Can you even tell them apart? I can, but only if I look at tiny details I know to look for. If I glance at them, I must say they are basically identical. A layman would never be able to tell them apart.
Is it worth paying a ton of money for a new font where the center of the letter "O" is just a little bit differently sized over an existing free font's letter "O"? I don't think so. Just pick an existing free font and be done with it. It's a highway sign, not a work of modern art.
For what it's worth, I think the new highway font is "stylistically" ugly, but from a practical point of view, the one benefit I can see is that most letters in the new font are bigger, i.e., they have a larger "x height." Any of a number of existing "large print" type fonts could have accomplished this.
Research that supported the reversal , it just wasn't stated. http://www.dot.state.mn.us/research/TS/2014/201411.pdf
Fickle font fiddlers forever face fiddling fastidiously for fantastically fine font fits.
Table-ized A.I.
They were accused at the time of pushing needless sign replacement, to the benefit of a handful of sign company employees. And union government employees to go around replacing them.
What to you and me is lose/lose is win/win to a senator or congressman.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
... "tight interstices".
Yeah, I know what it really means, but ouch. Just ouch.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
the antlers open up to the front, ya dummies. fix the signs. or go back to print.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
>Designers should be compensated. But the royalty model is perhaps broken.
This is my stance. By all means, we should have incentive for those who create imaginary property - maybe even more than now! But they'd be paid for their work; the creating, not the creation.
But... I don't actually know how that'd be implemented, so it's pie in the sky.
WTF am I gonna do now? All of my stuff in git used that font!
CAP === 'numbered'
or get trump to say we are going to use that font and we are not going to pay for it.
It may be that your state modifies the Standard Highway Signs. I just took a gander at sign W11-3, and not only does it look reasonable, but the antlers open to the front.
Take a basic course on design. You'll learn that subtle differences can have an impact on communication.
I've always found signs using the Clearview font to be harder to read at a glance. It just doesn't flow the way Highway Gothic does.
Clearview must purchase a standard license for type, a one-time charge of between $175 (for one font) and $795 (for the full 13-font typeface family) and up, depending on the number of workstations.
Use a stand-in font that gets re-rendered by a central computer to generate the results image and preview images before printing signs.
My understanding is that the images of characters cannot be copyrighted, only the name of the font. There is probably and open source substitute.
My personal choice for roadsigns is a toss-up between 'ransom' and 'stripper'
or go back to print.
Bad idea. Print only works at low speed. Originally all signs were text based, but when the UK introduced moterways, the speed was too great for drivers to read all of the sometimes lengthy signs. To deal with this, one art teacher (at high level) was assigned to make hard to misunderstand drawings. He forwarded most of the work to a student, who then made signs for all sorts of issues and carried on to make non-moterway signs for completeness. They worked very well and other countries started copying them. In fact the US is sort of an outsider in keeping such a high amount of text based signs. In fact USA is the only developed country, which actually write "railroad crossing" at railroad crossings.
Another bonus in pictures rather than text is it isn't fixed to one language. Driving in the US is fairly in this regard because it's English everywhere. However driving around Europe, you could end up with signs in Polish, German and French during the same day, or perhaps even more languages, depending on where you drive. Suddenly text based signs can become a safety hazard. For instance I wouldn't know what to make of a sign saying "slippery in wet conditions", but I do know the sign they use for that.
The common signs used in Europe, taken from the UK (I intentionally picked one with English text). Do note that it's incomplete, particularly if you view it as "signs in Europe". Also there are variations, like the steam train sign is replaced with a more modern train in Germany.
https://www.learnerdriving.com/learn-to-drive/highway-code/road-signs
Also another safety tip for Americans in Europe: if a railroad crossing has lights, then the train will not use the horn and the bell usually goes off when the gates are down. Despite this "reckless" setup, there is nearly no collisions compared to the US because people respect the red lights. In fact the 3 times I have seen a crossing fail, the cars stopped at the sight of the slow moving train before it sounded the horn (yes, they do use the horn when the crossing fails to turn on).
Open Source highway gothic font created by Red Hat.
In a crowded and eye-searing web page, Red Hat describes Overpass is a web font family "inspired" by Highway Gothic. In truly microscopic type, Red Hat concludes by saying that "Today's enterprise brands all have distinct typographic expressions. In the software arena, Overpass is strongly aligned to [the] Red Hat brand."
To me, this reads as something less than an unqualified commitment to open source licensing. What matters now, however, is that nowhere does Red Hat endorse the use of Overpass for highway signage. It wasn't designed or tested for that purpose.
It would probably be a big help to a lot of people, and pose no downside to normal people.
The font was designed for reflective white on green. The legibility studies are invalid for black on yellow.
I guess the font designers should have foreseen this and designed a family of two fonts called "negative" and "positive", but I cannot really fault them for failing to fully appreciate the magnitude of human incompetence.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Sounds like a job for COMIC SANS!
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Take as an example Arial vs. Helvetica. Can you even tell them apart? I can, but only if I look at tiny details I know to look for. If I glance at them, I must say they are basically identical.
Arial was created by Microsoft as a clone of Helvetica to save some money on licensing.
So that's no surprise.
What's next, open source software?
How much subtlety do you think you can pack in a sign that people are going to glance at while motoring past?
It isn't a book or a website, it's a road sign. Letter shapes must be kept basic and simple. Anything else is wasted effort that will never be seen. The most significant feature of the sign font that affects its motorist readability is simply its size. Make it bigger! Not complicated, doesn't require a super expensive font to do that.