Sunday, August 12, 2007

The Road to Clarity

Published: August 12, 2007
How a graphic designer and a typographer and their obsession with fonts and legibility led to a painstaking effort to clean up America’s road signs, one letter at a time.

"The typeface is the brainchild of Don Meeker, an environmental graphic designer, and James Montalbano, a type designer. They set out to fix a problem with a highway font, and their solution — more than a decade in the making — may end up changing a lot more than just the view from the dashboard. Less than a generation ago, fonts were for the specialist, an esoteric pursuit, what Stanley Morison, the English typographer who helped create Times New Roman in the 1930s, called “a minor technicality of civilized life.” Now, as the idea of branding has claimed a central role in American life, so, too, has the importance and understanding of type. Fonts are image, and image is modern America." Read more...

No comments: