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.