Motorway is a

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

Jock Kinneir Richard "Jock" Kinneir (11 February 1917 – 23 August 1994) was a British typographer and graphic designer who, with his colleague Margaret Calvert, designed many of the road signs used throughout the United Kingdom, Crown Dependencies, an ...

and

Margaret Calvert Margaret Vivienne Calvert (born 1936) is a British typographer and graphic designer who, with colleague Jock Kinneir, designed many of the road signs used throughout the United Kingdom, Crown Dependencies, and British Overseas Territories, as w ...

for use on the

motorway A controlled-access highway is a type of highway that has been designed for high-speed vehicular traffic, with all traffic flow—ingress and egress—regulated. Common English terms are freeway, motorway and expressway. Other similar terms i ...

network of the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. Motorway was first used on the M6 Preston bypass in 1958 and has been in use on the UK's motorways ever since. The font is also used in some other countries, most notably

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

and

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of ...

Motorway comes in two variants, "Motorway Permanent" and "Motorway Temporary". They are the same except for the weighting. Motorway Permanent is the standard weight, and is used for pale text on a dark background (i.e. white-on-blue permanent motorway signs) while Motorway Temporary is heavier, and is used for dark text on a pale background (i.e. black-on-yellow temporary motorway signs). Both typefaces have a limited character set - only containing the numbers 0 to 9; the letters "M", "A", "B", "N", "E", "S", "W";

parentheses A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

("(", ")"); a comma (","); an

ampersand The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram , representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters ''et''—Latin for "and". Etymology Traditionally in English, when spelling aloud, any letter that ...

("&"); and the word "Toll" (treated as a single character). The character "Toll" was added to the font set in summer 2007, in order to be added to any following new

M6 Toll The M6 Toll, referred to on signs as the Midland Expressway (originally named the Birmingham Northern Relief Road or BNRR), and stylised as M6toll, connects M6 Junction 3a at the Coleshill Interchange to M6 Junction 11A at Wolverhampton with ...

road signs on the motorway. Previously the word "Toll" was written in Transport Medium adjacent to "M6" written in Motorway Permanent. A full character set of the Motorway typeface was completed by the K-Type foundry in 2015, almost sixty years after its inception. The family includes the Bold (Temporary) weight, the SemiBold (Permanent) weight, and a previously unconsidered Regular (book) weight. There are also true italics for each weight.

Use in the UK

The Motorway alphabet appears on road signs on motorways in the United Kingdom, and is used for route numbers. On non-motorway roads at interchanges, the Motorway typeface may only be used on signs pointing in a direction where a driver would become immediately subject to motorway regulations. All other text on UK road signs appears in

Transport Transport (in British English), or transportation (in American English), is the intentional movement of humans, animals, and goods from one location to another. Modes of transport include air, land (rail and road), water, cable, pipeline, an ...

Use in Ireland

The Motorway font is also used in Ireland. Its use is slightly different from that in the UK - in the Republic, motorway route numbers are always in Motorway font, whether the sign is on a motorway or not. In addition, on signs erected before 2009, route numbers for all-purpose roads on motorway signs were in Transport font. On signs erected since 2009, all route numbers on motorways are now in motorway font, bringing Ireland closer to the UK practice (however, as Motorway font has not previously featured the letters "R" and "L", these letters still appear in Transport). As in the UK, all other text on road signs appears in Transport font.

References

{{Road-stub Sans-serif typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1958 Road transport in the United Kingdom

Use in the UK

Use in Ireland

See also

References