Road Signage

In July 1963 the Worboys Report was published, this report made recommendations for radical changes to be made for almost every road sign in the country. 

Until the Worboys report, road signs were made up of a mixture of signs produced by the Ministry of Transport, local councils, and motoring and cycling organisations. With their endless variety of shape, size, colour and typeface, it made for a confusing and jumbled up roadscape. 

It was realised that when passing signage at high speeds, it demanded for far greater standards in legibility. The government commissioned Jock Kinneir, who’d designed sleek new signs at Gatwick Airport, to come up with a system for the motorways. 

^Jock Kinneir 

Jock Kinneir’s signs were installed in 1958 on the very first motorway, the Preston bypass. Rival graphic designer David Kindersley criticised them as “signs as big as houses” and produced his very own in an attempt to prove that the same information could be effectively conveyed within far smaller dimensions. This he achieved by utilising only capital letters, which take up less space than a mix of upper and lower case letters. At speed, the visual shape of a word in mixed case lettering helps its recognition: “Birmingham” is far more easily absorbed than “BIRMINGHAM”, for example. This was one of the deciding factors in favour of Jock Kinneir. 

Kinneir, and his former student Margaret Calvert, were also charged by Worboys to take the rules of their motorway signage system and apply it throughout the entire road network. As on the motorway signs, the main features were a mixture of upper and lower case lettering in a clear sans serif font, installed on direction signs that resembled a simple map oriented towards the driver. The font, based on an early 20th century German typeface called Aksidenz Grotesk, became known as Transport, and has been called “the handwriting of Britain”. 

It wasn’t just direction and junction signs that came under Kinneir and Calvert’s beady gaze. Worboys demanded new instruction and warning signs, too. These were codified into a system of pictograms, many inspired by or adapted from those in use on the continent. 

There were also personal touches. For the sign warning of an imminent school, Calvert based the sign on a photo of herself as a young girl, pulling along her smaller brother. 

Prior to Worboys, many such signs in Britain depended on the literal spelling out, in words, of the danger ahead. The stark new pictograms with their bold red edging fitted an era that was beginning to take graphic design far more seriously. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/10353447/The-history-of-British-road-signs.html