Potholes. Traffic jams. Road closures. Snarky drivers. Security scares. No left turns here. No right turns there. As if that list of the infuriating obstacles you’re likely to encounter when driving around London wasn’t long enough, you can now add something else — sloppily designed traffic signs.
Duh, you may think. Why grouch about traffic signs, if you risk being stuck in gridlock or snapped by surveillance cameras while making a cheeky U-turn to avoid being “diverted” for several miles? But some of Britain’s new road signs deserve to be grumbled about because they are shameful examples of the category of bad design that is best described as “a crime against design.”
Bad design comes in many forms. Things that are unsafe. Things that don’t work properly, or are unnecessarily complicated. Things that are ethically or environmentally unsound. Crimes against design are different. They deprive us of the joy of great design, by wrecking or replacing it.
Some, though thankfully not all, of Britain’s newest traffic signs are guilty of the first offense by spoiling something special: the road signage system designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert between 1957 and 1967. There was nothing showy about it. Those signs were models of logic and legibility in a pleasing, but unobtrusive style. They were everything that intelligently designed road signs should be.
The same applies to other recent changes to Kinneir and Calvert’s meticulously planned system. Symbols are poorly drawn, with distractingly fussy detailing. Inconsistencies appear: one sign reads “Tower Bridge,” another “Tower bridge.” Individually these gaffes seem inconsequential, but collectively they are as confusing as the original designs were clear and reassuring.
The worst of the new traffic signs are typical of what can occur when whoever takes charge of an intelligently designed system lets things slip. It’s easy to see how this can happen. First, no one is likely to care quite so much about the system as the people who conceived it. Second, such systems need to evolve over time: in this instance, with the emergence of new types of road hazards and traffic management technology.
But there is no need for standards to fall. Not all of the new signage is sloppy. Much as I hate the congestion charge that motorists have to pay when driving in or out of central London, its red and white “C” symbol is clear, coherent and pleasing to the eye in Kinneir and Calvert’s unshowy style.
“Letting things slip” isn’t the only sub-category of crimes against design. Another is the “unworthy successor” syndrome, which usually happens when a company hires a design consulting firm to “refresh” an inspired piece of design, only to end up with something similar, but depressingly inferior.
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