They set out to fix a problem with a highway font, and their solution — more than a decade in the making — may end up changing a lot more than just the view from the dashboard… Now, as the idea of branding has claimed a central role in American life, so, too, has the importance and understanding of type. Fonts are image, and image is modern America.

From Sunday’s New York Times, a piece entitled, “The Road to Clarity” about the development of a new typeface for road signs to help increase legibility and safety–complete with slideshow and detailed analysis of typographical elements as well as previous typefaces. Or as their one-line summary puts it, “how a graphic designer and a typographer and their obsession with fonts and legibility led to a painstaking effort to clean up America’s road signs, one letter at a time.”

I got unnaturally excited about this since it’s something I’ve been wondering about lately while looking at highway signs, train stations, street signs, etc. and noticing the variety of typefaces used on each. The lack of consistency irritated my OCD self, but also made me wonder what sort of development or “evolution of signage” was going on.

Timely. All the news that’s fit to print indeed. They included something I found worthy of my time anyway.

Today started off with a bang. This morning, I tripped and fell in the street crossing over to my office and scraped up my knee quite nicely. I was wearing a skirt, so the embarrassment of tripping was honestly the more painful part for me. I will take a sleep aid tonight so I don’t keep replaying those 20 seconds over and over again in my head tonight and keep myself from falling asleep.

I got into the office and cleaned it up, but the best part was walking around the rest of the day with a huge 3″ x 2″ band-aid across my knee - looking all professional-like. If I had some some roller skates, pigtails and a big lollipop, I’d be ready for my own personal “Xanadu” or 2nd grade birthday party, or I could ditch the roller skates and find some multi-colored overalls and try to bring back Rainbow Brite (her friend Patty O’Green - and I can’t believe I remembered this - sported band-aids on her knees… it’s amazing how these little things just come back to you, and how Google and some obsessive collector people can help you do a little blast from the past thing).