Some things work best when you notice them least. Spies, for example, and lungs. And sewers.
There is no better example of unobtrusive effectiveness than the Great British Road Sign: a pioneering, unchanging, unheralded and elegant example of functional graphic design that has been quietly directing the traffic, and saving lives, for half a century.
British road signage is the best in the world, a clear and distinctive combination of colour coding, symbols and pictograms that has been copied by many other countries. When foreign road signs are Latinised, they are usually written in “Transport”, the font specifically invented for British road signs — signs that are so fully absorbed into our everyday visual landscape that we don’t notice we are noticing them.
And yet traditional British road signage, a triumph of postwar design, is under threat as never before, jostled and obscured by the increasing clutter on our roadsides, an ugly, spreading thicket of signs instructing, warning, selling and generally providing vast amounts of information that motorists do not actually need to get from one place to another safely and quickly.
The virtue of the British road sign is its simplicity and precision. Today motorists are visually bombarded to a degree that is not just confusing and irritating, but dangerous, since drivers do not have time to absorb all the information being thrown at them. Numerous studies have shown that reducing road signage cuts down accidents, yet signs continue to sprout and proliferate along our roads at a bewildering rate.
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By the early 1960s Britain’s road signage system was a mess, a hodgepodge of different signs produced by various authorities, councils and private bodies, haphazard, inconsistent and unsafe.
In 1963 two graphic designers, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, set out to invent a standardised countrywide system of signage, and launched the most radical revolution in motoring since the invention of tarmac.
The unsung architects of the modern roadscape, Kinneir and Calvert created a masterpiece, both practical and stylish — with place names usually in lower case (Edinburgh can be read faster than EDINBURGH), a simple colour scheme and a new typeface with bold, rounded letters and consistent spacing, legible at 70mph and perfectly undistracting.
Earlier signs had often spelt out in words what was up ahead. Kinneir and Calvert drew simple pictograms instead, most of which are still in use: the girl leading her little brother to school (replacing the public schoolboy in cap), the impossibly crossed skid marks of the swerving car.
Their images are reminiscent of an earlier Britain: the warning for a level crossing without barrier is a toy steam train; the cars are 1950s models. The final result was a triumph of visual logic and a classic of British modernist design. But it also worked, communicating essential information clearly, quickly and effectively and reducing accidents. The number of vehicles on Britain’s roads has tripled in 50 years, but the number of road deaths is one quarter of what it was when these pioneers set out to direct the traffic by design.
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Their designs survive almost unchanged, but increasingly competing for space with acres of new signage: bald, boring, commercial and frequently superfluous. Later designs lack the delicate touch of Kinneir and Calvert. The modern sign for frail pedestrians depicts a stooped old couple, shuffling towards death.
In a society apparently unable to protect itself against the most obvious dangers (peanut butter that “may contain nuts”), too many road signs are intended to cajole, caution and browbeat rather than inform: the obnoxious speed camera signs, endlessly repeated, for mile after finger-wagging mile; signs demanding “Stop when lights how” (really?) or “Reduce speed now” (as if one would normally accelerate into a roundabout); and the exquisitely pointless “Sign not in use”.
Kinneir and Calvert minimised distractions, so that motorists could concentrate on driving. Today drivers are pummelled with so many messages, offering hamburgers and tourist attractions, they are likely to miss the ones that actually matter.
Many Scottish road signs have been expanded to incorporate Gaelic translations of place names, often in parts of Scotland where no one speaks Gaelic. The sign to Glasgow is now twice the size and in three colours, because it must also point the way to “Glaschu”. So far from enhancing the tourist experience, it merely blots out more of the view. A report last year by Transport Scotland found that bilingual signs force motorists to concentrate harder, not on driving but on trying to understand the signs.
Today’s plethora of road signs insistently demand to be noticed; the Kinneir-Calvert system, by contrast, was instantly intelligible without ever being obtrusive, and that was its genius. Kinneir himself compared road signage to “oil in an engine, without which the moving parts would seize up”. But Britain’s roadsides are now almost as messy and confusing as they were before the designers of the 1960s set out to rationalise the system.
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For decades Kinneir and Calvert managed to keep the traffic moving by coining a simple, clever and rather beautiful language of images, colours and letters, a kerbside lingua franca that spread across the globe.
British designers clearly signposted the way forward for our roads; but somehow, along the way, we managed to get lost.
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