Monday, August 13, 2007

Clarity

Usually the articles I find enjoyable because they're pertinent to my job most people wouldn't.

This may be the exception:

Road signs first appeared in ancient Rome as stone markers counting the distances to various cities in the empire. In the age of the automobile, they began popping up on the side of the road a little more than a decade after the Ford Motor Company released its first Model T. Auto clubs and state highway departments placed the markings with little thought toward uniformity or consistency...

3 comments:

Chairman said...

Westy - did you just post about different fonts that we see on road signs? Can we go back to killing babies or immigrants? It's not that I don't appreciate a good, clean font when I'm driving. It's just that people don't tend to get as riled up about it.

Greg McConnell said...

Chairman, at least the evolution of our road signs is a practical topic. After all, my intuition tells me that even if someone could write a paper that clearly explains how human intuition works, I still wouldn't be able to understand it. =)

Chairman said...

The Board Room has never been about accessibility. However IJAB has often been a place for a lot of fun discussions.

I would, however, like to lobby for a future article that discusses the ratio of shiny bits that goes into the paint that we get on our highways, and how that compares to the reflectivity of the shiny things we put in the roads for improved nighttime driving. That would be hot :-)