John Gruber has just posted an inter­est­ing (and opin­ion­ated) analy­sis of the fonts installed on the iPhone.

These let­ters are col­or­ful, flex­i­ble, fun---and delicious!

Note how the lim­i­ta­tions of this non­tra­di­tional mate­r­ial are expressed. Since gummy is just barely a solid, the let­ters are shaped for struc­tural sta­bil­ity. Letters with large open spaces---D, O, Q---are nar­row, for exam­ple, while the G’s hor­i­zon­tal stroke con­nects to its stem, and the V’s ver­tex is half as high as the entire let­ter. (My guess is this keeps it from being mis­taken for a lop­sided L.)

I’m impressed that the man­u­fac­turer didn’t cut cor­ners like pre­tend­ing that W is just an upside-down M, or Z a side­ways N. There really are 26 dif­fer­ent let­ter­forms here.

Now, what would gummy punc­tu­a­tion look like?

The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this sign was, “Those poor, slow chil­dren.” And then, “Should we really be encour­ag­ing them to drive?”

But then I start­ing look­ing closely at the actual let­ters on the sign (of course). They got me think­ing about the lim­i­ta­tions of stamp­ing shapes into metal -- how right angles and other sharp points will always come out softer than you’d like, how fine lines aren’t really pos­si­ble, and how that phys­i­cal­ity of the mate­r­ial trans­lates into squar­ish let­ters with rounded edges.

Notice, for exam­ple, how the strokes are all of even width, and how the nor­mally sharp points of the let­ter W are squared off. This has to do with leg­i­bil­ity, since the mes­sage has to be instantly clear when viewed from a mov­ing vehi­cle (although I think the phras­ing could be improved here). But it also has to do with the mate­r­ial being used, and the process of stamp­ing, then paint­ing the steel sign.

It seems this embossed process is on the way out, how­ever, as most new street signs I see are printed flat, using a reflec­tive mate­r­ial. This, unfor­tu­nately, has enabled sign­mak­ers to use the default Windows fonts to label our roads. It will be inter­est­ing to see how sig­nage evolves and how much (or lit­tle) it con­tin­ues to be informed by the stamped metal forms of the past.