Unfortunately, Katia Bachko's
entire piece on Clearview, New York City's new typeface for all road signage, is behind
The New Yorker's paywall. If you've got a subscription you can read the whole delightful thing, and come to a new appreciation of how difficult it can be to render a legible fraction on a road sign. According to James Montalbano, one of Clearview's designers, fractions are "a uniquely American thing. Elsewhere, it's metric--they're all decimal."
The New York
Times is a little more generous and will let you read
this piece in its entirety, and will show you pictures of the old and new signage.
But maybe
the best evidence that typeface selection really matters is from the Clearview website itself:
 |
| What designers call 'reduced halation.' |
