Rarely do we get something so right first time as we did with the road signage system born half a century ago. It was in July 1963 that the Worboys Report was published, with its recommendation for radical change to almost every road sign in the land.
Until Worboys, waymarking of roads and destinations had been achieved by a jumble of signs produced by the Ministry of Transport, local councils, motoring and cycling organisations and private concerns. With their endless variety of shape, size, colour and typeface, it made for a cluttered and confusing roadscape.
The system recommended in the 1963 report took its cue from the one created five years earlier for Britain’s first motorways. Realising that signage at the new high speeds demanded far greater standards of legibility from a distance, the government had commissioned Jock Kinneir, who’d designed sleek new signs at Gatwick Airport (his black-on-yellow colour scheme survives as the airport standard), to come up with a system for the motorways.
Kinneir’s signs were installed on the very first motorway, the Preston bypass in 1958, and to considerable acclaim. Not unanimous, however: rival graphic designer David Kindersley criticised them (“signs as big as houses”) in letters to The Times, and produced his own in an attempt to prove that the same information could be effectively conveyed within far more concise dimensions. This he achieved by utilising only capital letters, which take up less space than a mix of upper and lower case thanks to the plethora of letters (such as l, k, p, b, g, y, f and d) that stretch either up or down in their lower case form.