Signs

"Again, this is all about context. It’s a large format book and it’s written by two people who work at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. It’s predominantly photographs with brief captions and it just shows you how type is used on signs throughout the world: road signs, engravings on big important buildings in Rome, signs on departure boards. It just makes you think about information and the way that the type, if it’s done fantastically well, is almost unnoticeable. If it isn’t done well you look at it long and hard and it ruins your eye. The classic example of this, which they look at in the book, is the battle to find the perfect typeface for the British motorway and road signs. So this was the late 50s, early 60s, when two people, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert – and she’s still alive, I talked to her – designed the motorway signs. They suggested that a mixture of upper and lower case letters are read far more easily than capitals alone, and they also did a lot of semi-scientific research by getting a group of airmen to sit in a field in Oxford as a Ford Anglia car drove towards them with different signs on its roof, and they had to note down, inevitably on clipboards, which signs they could read and when. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Then there is the significance of how lettering varied from country to country, so every country had its own style. The German style used to be very heavy and gothic but is now neat and information-heavy. The French style is classically still more ornate than the British. It looks as though the signs for every country with an underground system dictate the mood for the rest of the city. That’s certainly true for Paris with the art deco lettering. It used to be the case that you could be parachuted into any country in the world and know where you were by looking at the typeface. Now the influence of globalisation and branding means it’s all there for the taking from the digital font menu. We’re losing that lovely individuality and that’s what’s clear from this book."