   |
|
|
 |
North America (cont.) How to Create a Digital License Plate Font for your State’s Department of Motor VehiclesLicense
Plate Fonts of the Western World In-House Font Design vs. Outside TalentIf you’re looking at the move to flat digital license plates, the issue of what font to use will need to be confronted at some point. A seemingly simple question on the face of it, as you get further into things, you realize there’s a lot more to the decision than it first appears. The importance of a good typeface designer. Whether you’ll be replicating your previous embossed font in digital form or moving to a new digital font, if you care about getting a good result, finding someone who knows how to design type well will make the difference. The choices boil down to whether it will be someone on your own design staff, perhaps someone on the equipment manufacturer’s staff, or a professional type designer. It would probably be rare to find someone who can design type well in either of the first two groups. Graphic design skill is a prerequisite but not sufficient in itself. Font design, whether replicating a previous font or creating a new one, is a much more specialized task and more complicated than it might appear, at least if you want an even marginally good result, let alone an excellent one. Should you design the font in-house or look elsewhere? We’ll be up front that you risk problems like what we’ve pointed out with New York, Oregon, or Washington’s digital replicas on the previous page if you do things yourself. For the prime example of what can happen when people without sufficient background or experience in the field try to create or modify fonts, look at what happened with 3M’s original default font that we’ve examined in depth earlier. Also see Waldale Manufacturing’s fiascos with Delaware’s recent digital fonts for another example, and the state’s license plate contract rebidding process that was needed to fix the situation. Considering the missteps that have been characteristic of plate-making equipment suppliers’ attempts at fonts, you would probably do best to get the equipment supplier’s input on technical requirements only, but look elsewhere for the actual font design. (In fairness, such suppliers are equipment manufacturers, not typeface designers, but the point is worth emphasizing.) The above having been said, the new digital font that Alabama, South Dakota, and Tennessee are now using in common may have been designed by 3M. If so, 3M has learned a few things since their first effort, and the new font is certainly better than 3M’s original default font regardless. Nonetheless, it’s possible to do better, as Colorado has shown. So, while ideally we’d recommend you find a bona fide typeface designer, if you’d like to do things yourself, the rest of this page’s discussion will get you started with the process. The tips and pointers here should also be helpful if you’re managing the process at a higher level or have subcontracted the work to someone else. Overall digital font design issuesEmbossed font replicas vs. the alternatives. Whether you want to preserve your state’s license plate “heritage,” so to speak, and continue the use of your previous embossed-plate font but on digital plates, or move to a different font instead, creating a font that’s well-suited for digital license plates depends on several things.
Legibility. As discussed previously, legibility of the font should be paramount. Legibility depends on:
A more in-depth examination of the above two bullet points, including examples, can be found in our comparison chart examining 3M’s default font vs. Keystone State, a replica of Pennslvania’s embossed font. Balancing legibility with graphics. Don’t swallow claims from digital plate-making equipment suppliers that a bolder font is necessarily better without reviewing the specific case. It might be, but probably not, and particularly not with 3M’s original default font — there’s a tradeoff with counterspace. Particularly when use of a bolder font is suggested by the plate equipment manufacturer to try and make the font stand out better when it’s overprinted on top of graphics that are too prominent or too busy, that’s not a good answer to the question of balancing graphics with legibility. If the font does not stand out in relation to graphics on the plate, the problem is almostly invariably that the graphics are too prominent, not a problem that a bolder font would solve. Also resist the suggestions of equipment suppliers who push a too-narrow font to squeeze in more graphics so they can sell the graphics capabilities of their equipment at the expense of legibility. Legibility should come first. See “License to Obscure” by type designer Mark Simonson for real-world examples of taking graphics too far. How much space is available on your state’s plate layout for the serial numbering? This will determine — when balanced with legibility issues — what the proportions of the font needs to be, and how condensed. As we’ve discussed, too much condensing compromises legibility. The best course of action is really to design the plate layout and any graphics around the font size and proportions rather than vice versa. After all, the primary purpose of license plates is for the large serial number to be read easily. If you emphasize graphics too much, you may be tempted down the road of an overly compressed font, and end up with something like 3M’s default font, which we’ve extensively criticized for that reason (among others). Monospaced font (most likely) or proportional font? Traditional embossed fonts are monospaced, meaning every character, even normally narrower characters such as the number 1 and the letter I, as well as the normally widest characters such as M and W, must be redesigned to utilize the same width for successful use on license plates. (Old typewriter fonts are the classic example of a monospaced font.) With embossed plates this requirement is an enforced one. Since the embossing dies that stamp out characters are made of metal and each character’s embossing die has to be interchangeable with any other in a standard-sized character slot, all characters’ embossing dies for a font must be manufactured to the same width. Monospaced fonts fit into consistent, predictable amount of space. With digital fonts, monospacing is no longer a requirement, so proportionally spaced fonts are a possibility. However, the exact, predictable amount of space taken up by a serial number with a monospaced font is useful for other reasons. One is if the serial number is split up into two groups of 3 digits, one on the left and one on the right, there will be a predictable and unvarying amount of space leftover in the middle in which to put a graphic icon. For instance, see Colorado’s special-issue plates for this type of plate layout, or for other variations on this approach, see Kentucky’s special issues.) Also, if a vehicle has a trailer hitch located in the middle of the back bumper, there’s much less chance it will obscure one of the digits in the plate number that way. Another reason is that when graphics are used in a plate design, wherever they might be located, a consistent-width serial number ensures the number won’t crash into or overlap the graphics in an inopportune way, as might happen with a proportionally spaced font. “Problem characters” in monospaced fonts. One problem however, as mentioned above, is how to design the numeral 1, capital I, M, and W characters in particular to fit the monospaced grid. Without a knowledgeable typeface designer, there’s a high probability the results will end up crude and ugly, as happened with 3M’s default font. Additionally, all other characters must be designed to fit the same width as well, which may not seem like a problem since the changes will be more subtle, but can negatively affect legibility due to smaller amounts of counterspace (interior white space) that can result than if characters are given more room to breathe at their more natural width. Also, if care is not taken here so that characters properly fit within the monospaced grid, you’ll end up with spacing that’s too uneven between characters — some character combinations cramped and overly tight, but others too gappy. (Some unevenness of spacing is inevitable with monospaced fonts, but with careful design, it can be minimized.) Proportionally spaced fonts look better since they avoid the cramped design and uneven spacing of monospaced characters, and some characters will be more legible. The tradeoff is the variable space that characters take up, so plate layouts using proportionally spaced fonts should be designed to accommodate this. Testing a proportionally spaced font on a plate would involve setting up longest and shortest-width character strings to assess how well each of the extreme cases would work within the plate layout. (Character strings using mostly or all letter I and numeral 1 would be used to generate the shortest-width strings, then strings with M and W and numerals other than 1 for the widest ones.) Replicating your embossed license plate fontA primary issue is how faithfully to copy the character shapes, because an exact digital copy of an embossed font won’t look quite the same on a flat plate to the human eye. If copied exactly, usually it will look cruder and more spindly unless careful compensations are made. Review the discussions about Colorado, New York, Oregon, and Washington’s replicas of their own embossed fonts for suggestions plus pitfalls to avoid here. Begin with scans or close-up photos. To replicate a preexisting embossed font, the basic procedure is to start with scans or close-up photos of your previous plates to get a representative sample of characters. (Scans are better. Not only are they more close up, but photos can introduce perspective distortions the closer up you take the picture from.) Then, as a starting point, use the samples as templates to begin tracing the basic character countours, usually with a font creation program, or sometimes perhaps with a drawing program such as Illustrator or CorelDraw. If the latter, the drawings will have to be imported into a font creation program afterward to continue with production.) You can do either autotraces or manual traces, however since an autotrace would have to be cleaned up manually anyway unless you are doing a total “warts and all” replication (not advisable even when embossing artifacts are incorporated in your design), you will be better off starting with a manual tracing from the beginning. Dealing with the artifacts and inconsistencies in embossed originals. Keep in mind here that the roller-coated characters on embossed plates will not be completely consistent in stroke thickness from one plate to the next, with occasionally varying edge shapes as well. Because of that you may want to get a few different samples of each character to decide on an average. From there, a professional type design approach will entail regularizing character stroke widths to a common standard — or set of standard stroke widths, actually, since horizontal strokes need to be a little less thick than verticals to look optically balanced to the human eye, and diagonals usually a bit thinner than verticals. As well, some changes to the character shapes may be needed, especially at junctions and vertexes where roller-coating over embossed character shapes will have introduced ink spreading. Whether to do so will depend on the look you want. For a more “authentic” historical look, you will want to keep some of the “ink spreading” effect, although reproducing it exactly according to your scans will result in inconsistencies that may look letter cleaned up some in the digital version. Finding a good typeface designerMany good typeface designers today, also many bad ones. If you are thinking this is beginning to sound a bit involved (we haven’t gotten, and won’t get, into other complexities of good typeface design), you will want to deal with a professional type designer for best results. However, because of the democratization of font design made possible by inexpensive digital software for personal computers, there are so many type designers around today that it can be hard to know where to start for someone not familiar with the field. There are many excellent font designers to choose from, but unfortunately also far more poor designers because of the democratization of the profession. We’ve therefore provided links here to the most well-known companies and individuals who do custom font design for corporations and other organizations. If you’re more comfortable working with companies of some size, you probably can’t go wrong contacting one of the larger or more established foundries such as:
There are numerous smaller foundries who are also excellent from whom you may get more individualized attention, however. The most prominent who come to mind and who develop custom fonts for commercial clients are the following (based in the U.S. unless otherwise noted). These foundries are well plugged in to the typeface design community and highly talented, some with very wide experience. So start with these, and if a firm doesn’t seem suited or interested, ask them for referrals elsewhere, and you will probably eventually find that the same names keep coming up again. In alphabetical order:
One suggestion here would be to try to locate those who are familiar with legibility as it applies to signage. Ask around and get referrals and proposals. Narrowing things down to the appropriate font designer for your needs may well be the most difficult part of the process. Also, we ourselves do consulting on license plate font design, so if you would rather someone with a lengthy career of wide-ranging typographic experience handle working with type designers such as those above, contact us at: . And of course, regardless of which route you take, contact your peers in the above states’ Departments of Motor Vehicles who have been through the digital transition, to learn from their experience and get advice and pointers. Brief rundown of professional
|
|
|
|
Site owner/author: Ward Nic holson | Tel: 316-691-8519 (Mon.–Fri., 8:30–5:30, Central Time) | Fax: 316-682-0459 | 5 N. Beech Rd., Wichita, KS 67206-2504 © 2008 Ward Nic holson. All rights reserved.
|
Page: