Road signs and an ageing population
A quarter of our population will be over 65 by 2026* and we are living longer, most of us will want to continue driving. Are our road signs designed to cope?
Research from the US has shown that their signs caused problems for older drivers and recommendations were made to produce much larger signs...
“The size of characters on all signs must be increased by at least 30%, which means 1 inch of character height to 38 feet of sight distance, versus the MUTCD standard of 1 inch for 50 feet. This would accommodate motorists testing 20/30 on the standard eye chart…” (Greene, et al 1996)
Thankfully, designers took an interest in the problem and rather than produce much larger signs they devised a more efficient typeface (font) to counter the effects of modern roads and an ageing population.
You can read more about the effects of halationhere.
*Central Statistics Office, CSO, Ageing in Ireland, 2007
Signs are getting bigger
Developments in directional road sign design
In the design of signs, in general, and more particularly road signs, international practise has pointed the way...
A reasonable proposition, in improving Ireland’s sign design, is to address the design of the actual type used. It has long been held by type designers that increased x-height is beneficial to typeface designs for signage. Since the 1960s, design for signage typefaces has concentrated on this and other factors of clarity – all notable new designs address x-height. In Ireland, where we’d be replacing the relatively larger uppercase words in English, use of increases x-height would be particularly applicable.
Above: A classic type, Caslon (left), has it’s x-height (height of the lowercase) compared to Transport (centre) and Clearview Hwy, the recent US road sign type. This illustrates the increased x-height of the Transport design, and how this has been surpassed by the Clearview design.
Read More...What's wrong with this sign?
