Blink and you'll miss it
During the recent Easter long weekend, my parents and I drove down from Sydney to Wollongong for a relaxing day out. At certain points along the journey, I noticed some signs like this:
What
Blink and you'll miss it
During the recent Easter long weekend, my parents and I drove down from Sydney to Wollongong for a relaxing day out. At certain points along the journey, I noticed some signs like this:
What struck me was the unconventional ampersand – it was jarring! Now I used to write the ampersand in this way, with a vertical line through it, but I have never encountered the “backwards 3” variation of the ampersand in any font or typeset material, so why is this less common variation used on Australian road signs? (Or, at least, on New South Wales signs.)
Digging deeper, our road sign letterforms are defined under Australian Standard AS1744, and based on a type family developed by the United States Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) for road signage in the Americas, commonly referred to as Highway Gothic.
Our AS1744 Series consists of six fonts, virtually identical to those above, which range in width from “B” (the narrowest) through “C”, “D”, “E”, “Modified E” (with thicker strokes) and “F” (the widest).
While the AS1744 fonts aren’t publicly viewable, we can examine the character set of the FHWA Series to see what its ampersand looks like. These are found in the Standard Highway Signs and Markings book, which reveals the following forms.
A normal ampersand! Again, why is ours different?! (Just to be clear, by “normal ampersand”, I mean the form with two closed counters, as above.)
Roads and Maritime Services, the government agency which manages the New South Wales road network, provides design plans for all traffic signs on its website. And this is where things get interesting.
The image below is from the design plan of the sign I photographed, officially called Regulatory Sign No. R6-240-1. It specifies sign dimensions and letter heights, plus it indicates the fonts used (in this case, “D” for four lines an