The weather service’s caps-lock habit didn’t happen entirely by choice. Old equipment left over from early weather service days of the late 1800s could only handle capital letters. Unfortunately, people have since learned to recognize those capital letters AS YELLING. It’s taken a long time for the weather service (and its customers) to update all their hardware and software, but now they’re finally ready to enter the 20th Century.
For type nerds everywhere, this is a triumphant typographic victory the likes of which we haven’t seen since Massimo Vignelli re-designed the New York City subway sign system. Ok, maybe that’s a stretch, but type choices are a big deal — and can, in fact, have life or death consequences.
In the case of the weather service’s all-caps type, it’s the font version of the boy who cried wolf. Using ALL CAPS for everything — from severe hurricanes to a slight chance of showers — means that EVERYTHING LOOKS THE SAME AND EVERYTHING LOOKS IMPORTANT. Once people realize that most of the time it’s not, they may become desensitized to warnings. When nothing stands out, people are likely to miss real emergencies.
Now that the weather service can use ALL CAPS sparingly — as a tool to highlight real danger — the public is more likely to pay attention.
“We realized we could still use ALL CAPS within products to add emphasis, such as ‘TORNADO WARNING. TAKE COVER NOW!’" said Art Thomas, the weather service meteorologist in charge of the project. “We hope that using all caps for emphasis will get people’s attention when it matters and encourage people to take action to protect their safety.”
A light touch on the caps-lock key is not just a good strategy for emphasizing the right things, but also just generally for making text easier to read. Because we see words as shapes, big rectangular blocks of all caps take us much longer to process. In an emergency, that extra time to decipher an urgent message may come at a cost.Of course, if you’re trying to make something hard to read, then all caps is the perfect choice. Companies that set safety warnings in all caps may, intentionally or not, veil important information from consumers. (...)
Companies can (and do) claim that they are trying to “emphasize” the important stuff by putting it in all caps. This is actually the reason so many legal documents and contracts have sections that seem to be shouting. You can blame U.S. law for this one (specifically, the Uniform Commercial Code) which requires that certain sections of a contract be "conspicuous.”
Usually those guidelines apply to the parts of the contract that sound something like: “COMPANY X DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT WE’LL KEEP ANY OF OUR PROMISES AND EVERYTHING IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.” Makes sense that those sections should be hard to miss.
Except that in this case, making text “conspicuous,” also makes it harder to read. And that’s because of a historical quirk. Technically the law defines conspicuous as:
“(A) a heading in capitals equal to or greater in size than the surrounding text, or in contrasting type, font, or color to the surrounding text of the same or lesser size; and
(B) language in the body of a record or display in larger type than the surrounding text, or in contrasting type, font, or color to the surrounding text of the same size, or set off from surrounding text of the same size by symbols or other marks that call attention to the language.”So why do we use all caps instead of bold or italic or even highlighted? Because back when lawyers used typewriters, the only simple way to emphasize anything was to use ALL CAPS. And while today our fancy post-typewriter machines could certainly render the text in other “conspicuous” ways, tradition is hard to break. Just ask the weather service.
But let’s look beyond all caps, to perhaps the most famous place where typeface choices might save lives: on the road.
U.S. road signs have been set in a typeface called Highway Gothic since the 1950’s, and it was the dominant typeface in use until the early 2000’s. But it had problems. Whether people noticed it or not, it was hard to read in rainy weather, from a distance, and at night. When light hit the words, they appeared to blend together in a glowing, blurry mess, something known as halation. This may be annoying to an average person, but if you’re an elderly person driving at 70 miles an hour with bad vision, it can be deadly.
So highway engineers struggled to find a solution. They thought maybe making the letters 20 percent bigger would solve it, but bigger letters would require bigger signs and end up costing billions of dollars. So they turned to two designers: an environmental graphic designer and a type designer. Those designers created Clearview, a new typeface that was designed to take up the same space as Highway Gothic but be much easier to read.
One of the most important changes was widening the tiny shapes inside letters called counter spaces (like the hole inside the O or P). But the designers also adjusted the height of the ascenders in characters like b, d, f, h, as well as spacing between letters. And all these changes, taken together, seemed to work! After a bunch of tests in bad weather and different conditions, Clearview was found to improve drivers’ reading accuracy, reaction time, and recognition distance. Soon, highways across the country began to adopt Clearview.
However, they won’t for much longer. The Federal Highway Administration announced this year that it’s not going to require new signs to be in Clearview, due to “significant confusion and inconsistency in highway sign design, fabrication processes, and application.” The administration also cites some evidence that Clearview doesn’t improve nighttime legibility that much. And so it’s throwing in the towel on font innovation, saying it “does not intend to pursue further consideration, development, or support of an alternative letter style.”
But elsewhere, life-saving typefaces are still making notable appearances on the road — this time inside the car.
by Lena Groeger, Pro Publica | Read more:
Images: Rob Weychert and National Weather Service
