User:BaronVonWill

Road Sign Design in the UK and its Implementation in CAD Systems

BaronVonWill is the online user name for Will Baron of Key Traffic Systems, a UK software developer. The company creates a range of software used throughout the UK and increasingly other countries around the world used by Traffic Engineers. This provides GIS analysis and CAD functions to assist with the management of Highway infrastructure.

Advertising and other information about the company can be found on their web site, but the main topic for this article is to discuss the principles of road signing in the UK as a discipline in own right. The main software used by a majority of sign designers in the UK is KeySIGN formerly known as AutoSIGN). The software implements the principles for road sign face design as laid down in the 1950s and 1960s by much of the work of the letter cutter David Kindersley. See also a further article about the principles of Road sign design in the UK.

The letter cutter David Kindersley was an inspiration to many people, inside and beyond his own particular art. He died in 1995 after a career of nearly 60 years, and his workshop in Cambridge continues under the extremely active leadership of his widow, Lida Lopes Cardozo, who came to work there in 1975. Kindersley was always willing to acknowledge the influence on him of Eric Gill, to whom he went as an apprentice in the 1930s. Gill's workshop practice influenced his own desire to combine traditional teaching with work, and contemporary Britain has more good lettercutters as a result than might otherwise be the case. His son Richard Kindersley, who has been working on his own since the 1960s, is a prime example. Gill trained other letterers, including Ralph Beyer (still active today) and Reynolds Stone, whose assistant and pupil Michael Harvey is one of the most versatile and original lettering designers now working, but nearly all those working today trace their origin back to Gill.

Kindersley's work ranged through many moods during his life. The exhibition, ABC David Kindersley, a life of letters, gives special attention to his work on the legibility of street-name signs and motorway signage. In the latter instance, his proposal that serifed capitals be adopted in preference to the upper and lower case sans serif designed in the 1960s by Jock Kinneir was rejected. The Kinneir signage continues in use and seems timeless, while Kindersley's rational alternative, while demonstrably functional in reducing the size of the signs, looks strangely awkward. His campaign for street-name signs began in 1947 when he saw the charming old cast-iron signs in Cambridge being taken down. Kindersley developed an alternative raised letter which he intended to have maximum legibility when viewed obliquely. He also developed a system for allowing non-experts to achieve the best optical spacing. Cambridge adopted his signs, and the Ministry of Transport paid him 150 for use of the designs. His font has been re-used recently in Cambridge for signing in and around the new shopping centre development called the Grand Arcade, and letter cutting design still continues to this day at the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop.

In 1958, the Ministry of Transport was kicked into action over road signing. Something had to be done because Britain's first motorway, the Preston Bypass, was due to open in just a few months. It was clear from the outset that the signs in the latest regulations would not be adequate for motorway traffic. See the excellent article here and for many example signs showing the devlopment of signing from the War to Worboys era.

The Anderson Committee began work on developing a set of designs for motorway signing, though it didn't report in time for the opening of the Preston Bypass. The motorway was used for some time as a test bed for the draft designs that the Committee came up with. These designs were very much influenced by practices in Germany and the USA, both of which had substantial lengths of motorway, and at one point considered adopting the typeface used by the US. James Drake, instrumental in the building of the Preston Bypass, was known to advocate the use of fork-style signs as used in Germany.

New typefaces were developed specially for motorway signing by Jock Kinneir. The principal new font was a modification of the established sans-serif font Aksidenz Grotesk. One of the crucial decisions of the Anderson Committee was to use mixed-case lettering instead of the standard uppercase. The decision was partly because lower-case was more fashionable in communications design at the time, and partly because mixed-case lettering was also being used on the most thoroughly researched traffic signing systems in the USA and Germany. The evidence for the relative legibility of all-uppercase against mixed-case lettering on signs is rather mixed to this day. The conservative view, arrived at when the California Division of Highways tested an experimental traffic sign typeface in Los Angeles (which eventually developed into Series E Modified/Lowercase, the typeface used on modern American freeway guide signs), was that mixed-case lettering made slightly more efficient use of sign area than all-uppercase lettering.

Kindersley made two principal criticisms of the new signs. The first was that Anderson Committee signs were too big ("signs as big as houses") and that the same information could be presented just as effectively on much smaller signs. The second concerned the choice of mixed-case lettering on the signs, as Kindersley and Crutchley believed that uppercase was more legible at distance, and in particular that there was greater scope to modify uppercase letters to improve their legibility than there was to do the same for lowercase.

To demonstrate their points, the pair took the advance direction sign for the Park Street Roundabout at the end of the M10, which was one of those diagrammed as an example by the Anderson Committee, and produced a new version to their own designs, which had just half the surface area of the original and used an all-uppercase font of Kindersley's own design. Kindersley managed to corner Ernest Marples, the Minister for Transport, at a society function and very nearly got him to agree to install the test sign on the road. The sign was not, in the end, installed because senior civil servants in the Ministry intervened and persuaded both parties that permission had never been granted for the experiment.

In addition, the Road Research Laboratory carried out its own tests to compare the legibility of MOT Serif (the all-capitals font in use in the 1955 regulations) and Transport Medium (the new mixed-case Anderson font), and found that MOT Serif had a 3% advantage, but only if there was extremely narrow spacing between lines of text and between the text and sign edge. The advantage was eliminated where the text did not take up most of the sign, which was the case on Anderson designs. While the results of this research could have been used to justify all-capitals lettering if the area of signs was drastically reduced - as Kindersley recommended - the Ministry wanted its signs to remain large. The better 'target value' of large signs was valuable to motorists, and in addition, separate research showed that motorists made fewer errors where junctions were explained through use of diagrams.

Kindersley's argument was not altogether disproved, but nonetheless, the Ministry decided to continue using Anderson Committee designs.

In 1950, the MOT bought his streetnameplate alphabet, calling it 'Kindersley', which is still to be seen in use today. (It has a very Trajan-inspired R). Having been in touch with one of the RRL testers of the 'MOTSerif' alphabet, it seems that there was political pressure to go for a "European" alphabet on the new motorway signs. The UK was used to all-capital direction signs and it has been said that this was retained as a ploy to confuse any invading Germans who were, of course, used to Lower-case lettering on their signs!

Even following the 1955 review and subsequent 1957 regulations, the Ministry's designs remained little more than 'best practice' guidelines. Any authority erecting a sign was simply advised to use the signs. There was some discussion of carrying out a thorough update to the whole system of signing - which materialised in the later Worboys Committee.

Between 1955 and 1957, the Road Research Laboratory conducted a series of experiments in Slough. Numerous diagrammatic signs were erected, in black on a white or yellow background, for junctions around the town. The signs used different combinations of destination and route number and altered the relative prominence of the two in an attempt to find out which combination produced the simplest navigation for the smallest sign area.

In arriving at their final set of designs, the Worboys Committee considered a wide range of ideas. As well as examining the standard European designs and the protocols of the Vienna Convention (which established international standards in traffic signs), the Committee came up with a number of ideas of its own.

For example, images exist of some of the experimental signs that were erected. One shows that italicised route numbers on B-roads were under consideration. Others show that for a time the Committee wanted to add diagonal bars across many signs that the Vienna Convention left open - such as "no pedestrians", "no cyclists", and very oddly, "no overtaking".

While the Committee eventually agreed that local direction signs would retain the blue border they gained in the 1955 regulations, a proposal that appeared concrete at draft stage but which did not make the final report was to have minor road signing in urban areas in black on yellow - this was so serious for a time that numerous test signs were erected across London. Some of the ideas above were removed from the draft so late that they were reported in some places as features of the new traffic sign system.

The final report of the Worboys Committee in 1964 detailed a set of traffic signs that was an enormous improvement over its predecessor. It received widespread congratulations from the press, industry and motorists themselves. The new Worboys signs and the revised motorway ones (which hadn’t come under the original scope of the Worboys Committee) were compiled into the new Traffic Sign Regulations and General Directions (TSRGD) and passed on to Parliament for approval.

Britain now, at last, conformed to European standards and the Vienna Convention, and made full use of the technology now available to make large, detailed and colourful signs. For the first time it was possible, without having to simply write the message in capital letters on a plain black-and-white sign, to warn drivers of a cul-de-sac, to instruct them to keep left and to prevent them from parking in a given location. A grasp of English was no longer required to understand the symbol for a narrowing road, and the urgency of having to STOP was no longer lost in the wordy instruction to "halt at major road ahead".

A major review of the direction signing system conducted in the late 1980s found effectively no problems with the Worboys system - it could only recommend the introduction of white-on-brown tourist signing and a few other minor changes. Worboys was a world leader in good signing practice.

Since 1964, the acclaimed system has been tweaked several times, but no need has ever been identified to change anything on a large scale. Blue borders have narrowed, and then disappeared; brown signs have popped up; new warning signs have emerged and old warning signs have had their symbols altered, and the stop sign has grown eight new corners. But most things remain the same.

Since its adoption, the Transport font has been called the handwriting of Britain. It has been adopted or adapted for Spanish, Icelandic, Portuguese (who also use the Motorway font) and Italian road signs, and from the Worboys report, everything from colour coding and design rules to exact pictogram designs have been borrowed and put into use somewhere else. The result of many years of experimentation and careful planning and design is a system of signposting that remains essentially the same forty years later, and is still met with much acclaim.