Design for an ageing population
Signs are getting bigger
June 2009 | Filed in: Sign design | Current sign design in Ireland
Above: Junction 14 cantilever on the M8 motorway (Cork), April 2009 (WIkipedia Commons).
At the outset of this design research project, I speculated that in the future Irish roadsigns may need to be redesigned, or grow substantially in size (perhaps a degree of both) to become effective on higher speed roads. Now, very large cantilever signs have replaced standard signs on many new sections of motorway.
Read More...Comments
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?
