Road signs and Irish Language

No, Republic's green signage is a much brighter shade than the UK. Nothing to do with age.

Signage uses exactly the same general rules: contrast, use of negative and positive space, eye-leading, but it has a different purpose, so emphasis is different.

The purpose of a website is to hold the reader’s attention for as long as possible, so that they read the content. The device displaying the site emits light, so there’s no need to worry about legibility in different light levels, or weather conditions, and viewing distance is constant (although I’ll go way off topic if I start talking about the evils of designing mobile-device interfaces based on text that looks the right size on a desktop monitor)

The purpose of a sign is the opposite: impart the information quickly so that the driver can go back to watching the road. A sign also has to be legible from different distances, in rain or clear weather, by daylight or by reflected headlights. These all put serious limitations on what you can do on the sign surface.

Colour was omitted from the UK motorway signage by design (and we adopted their signage), as it also was from the German Autobahn signage that inspired it. Coloured text is a eye-magnet, and for signs that had to be read at high speed, it was found to slow down recognition, not help. Remember that when the UK’s motorway signage was designed, there was no upper speed limit in the UK - first signs were done in 1958, the the 70 mph limit came in in 1965/66.

Signage is a system, not a collection of unique designs. If there’s a conflict between looking pretty and being logically consistent with other parts of the system, then consistent wins every time. The signs we have here in Ireland often fail on both fronts, but when that happens, the key problem isn’t that they’re not pretty, it’s that they’re not consistent: it is sometimes more difficult to apply patterns that you have learned from seeing one category of signs (e.g., advance direction signs) to interpreting another class of sign (e.g., motorway gantries).

I consider the UK road signage system to be the best in use today because it manages the difficult task of being both consistent and aesthetically pleasing. The UK system still has odd areas (motorway gantries, again; or the over-use of complex diagrammatic signs that look cool but are harder to understand), but it’s superior to the other options Ireland had to choose from in the 1970s (Germany or the USA). Of course we could have just rolled our own, but we’re a small country, and the cost of doing things right is considerable... and we wouldn’t have spent that cost.

@D.L.R. It is entirely true that old UK signs were a darker shade of green than the new ones are: anything before the mid 1980s used reflective paint in a deep green colour, newer signs use a mid-green prismatic material, and the newest ones are brighter again. Even where you see newer signs beside 10-year-old ones, the newer ones are more reflective.

You make it sound like the UK has signs that are all one uniform shade of green, and that is not true (it’s not true in Ireland either). Leaving aside that there are four independent agencies managing road signage in the UK, each with their own local standards, each local authority then sources signs from different manufacturers, so there can be a fairly wide variation in colour across the country. What part of the UK are you comparing with Ireland?

I prefer the right. Some nice improvements there over the current standard, for me. The italics is a biggest issue. I find it much easier to read the right hand sign than the left. Cill Airne really stands out to me as "less legible" and "more legible".

Personally, I prefer the middle one. I find having both English and Irish in the same font, size and colour really confusing.

I wonder if, rather than having the text aligned to the left, whether having it centred would make any difference with clarity? -For ex. with yellow & white text (example two) - would need to extend the sign to accommodate the junction symbols , though that might look even better?

There are variations to the letter ‘a’ in your examples - the closed ‘a’ looks better I think 🙂

Interesting designs you created- fair plé to ya!

It's a nice font but the serif on it would make it slower to read.

I agree with people that say that the CAPITALS in our current signs give the impression of being easier to read but I think that Camel Case is easier for people to read at speed.

@EthanL13

You’re very confident of that statement - far more so than people who have had to make those decisions. There’s a trend away from mixed-case lettering from the 1970s onwards, so it’s not as clear-cut as you suggest. France modernised its signage very late - around the same time we did - and it adopted capital letters for its autoroute signage on the basis of research that suggested the higher X-height of using capitals outweighed the information carried by word shape.

Mixed-case has higher legibility for words, but names are not words. (This is why I particularly dislike the USA’s signage, which uses mixed-case for destinations, and all-caps for instructions)

👍 Could the route number be on the arrows like in this sign? …might space things out a bit more. Some of the signs in France have the route numbers above the signs also.

It's a road sign not a pub sign.

The left hand example is clearly most preferable of the three imho. For non Gaeltacht areas i.e. 98% of the state. The commonly used & understood names for the towns are easily read, the road labeling is clearly separated, the italicised Irish form is there for those who wish to see it.

Of course it would fall foul of O'Cuiv's Official Langauages Act but that's a fault of said Act and Constitution. What can sign designers do when their hands are tied by green eyed pretension?

Good point, language tokenism is exactly it...

“Plenty of examples?” Can’t think of any with Irish only.

Here, meanwhile is an example, taken at random, of the standard arrangement that’s used for rural motorway junctions.

There are five separate indications here that you’re going the wrong way:

• Solid line across the road
• International standard “No Entry” sign
• Yield marking against your direction of travel
• “Turn back/ no-forward / Cas ar Ais” sign boards.
• Arrrow against you painted on road ahead

The design of the roundabout itself also makes it awkward to make this turn (you have to drive on the right all around it, or you end up needing to make a nasty sharp left.

In short, you could write “watermelons” on the signboard, and it would not make much difference to comprehension.

But yeah, get het up about Irish...

Even if mentally driving on the right, isn't a person going the wrong way on a slip road to enter the main road going to be looking to the left? That's where the traffic into which they expect to merge will be.

And yet I have met oncoming traffic on the N40 one multiple occasions. And it is SCARY when it happens, because their speed plus your speed makes it all very fast.

Cork Airport designed its own road signage when the airport was extended in the 2000's. It was all bad, and has mostly been replaced with proper designs since, but the very worst example was the small sign just at the exit that read:

• Drive on left
• Conduire à droite
• Links fahren

It was patched a month later, but has now been replaced with the standard yellow “ATTENTION/ACHTUNG!" sign