ClearviewHwy Type System
FHWA Approval
The Clearview typeface has received interim approval by the FHWA for guide signs, and other positive contrast applications.
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State Adoption
Clearview has been adopted by many states including Pennsylvania, Texas, Arizona, Illinois, South Carolina and Michigan and highway departments throughout Canada.
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Interdisciplinary Development Team
Development Team: Clearview was designed and developed by an interdisciplinary team including perceptual psychologists, traffic engineers, type designers, graphic designers, vision experts and optics engineers. Primary research was conducted by the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute and the Texas Transportation Institute.
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Significant Benefits
Clearview significantly outperforms the standard highway guide sign typefaces with documented improvements in legibility distance up to 29 percent. With highway-sized signs on 55 mph roadways, this translates into an additional one to three seconds to read and respond to a sign. Studies conducted on sign message recognition revealed significant improvement in reading distances with mixed-case Clearview typefaces over all-uppercase Standard Highway Alphabets (Garvey, et al., 1997). Furthermore, sign message legibility was found to be significantly greater with the mixed case Clearview typefaces than with the mixed case Standard Highway Series E-modifed in several independent research studies (Garvey, et al., 1997; 1998; Hawkins, et al., 1999; and Carlson and Brinkmeyer, 2002). This body of research led to the 2004 FHWA approval of Clearview on positive contrast guide signs.
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Available Typefaces
The Clearview Type System includes 6 weights, with each weight provided with a version for positive contrast applications (light on dark) with letter shapes designed for viewing at greater distance and with overglow reduced or eliminated, and a version for negative contrast applications that is designed to compensate for the underglow of light color backgrounds with black type.
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Fully Integrated With SignCAD
The ClearviewHwy® font software was developed by the Clearview design team. ClearviewHwy® font software is fully compatible with all SignCAD® products. The ClearviewHwy® fonts are displayed in SignCAD with full dimensions and with tables showing letter widths and spacing. The Clearview fonts are scaleable for both English and Metric formats.
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