How can you not love how these Os just lean over and roll off the baseline, just as a cuckoo’s call trails off into nothing? Just perfect.

How cool are these Gs? I’ve never seen a G like this before, where the cross-stroke points out (to the right) instead of in (to the left). The result is a form that looks almost like a rotated Q.

Also, the combination of sharp and rounded corners here makes for some interesting shapes. Take the Y for example: it looks like a goalpost.

Clarendon is one of my favorite typefaces. An early slab-serif, the original face was designed by the Englishman Robert Besley in 1845. At the time, it was an entirely new form, something of a hybrid between typical Roman letters and the extremely heavy Egyptian forms of the day. Besley was going for shapes strong enough to be used alongside Roman text for emphasis, but not so strong that they would overwhelm or distract from the main text.

Using boldface for emphasis was a very new idea at the time — italics were more typical — and few, if any, fonts had bold variants of the same face. (When bold text appeared, it was usually set in a different typeface than the surrounding text, thereby causing typographers to struggle for bold/non-bold pairs that would complement each other.) Thanks to Besley, using boldface for emphasis is now common, and most common typefaces are designed with bold variations.

My personal connection to Clarendon has been cultivated over a lifetime of wonderful experiences in the United States’ National Parks, where it is used on the ubiquitous brown road signs. From “Campsites, 100 Yards,” to “Lock Your Vehicle, Keep Valuables With You,” Clarendon has always been there to give me guidance and direction, telling me where to go and what to do in some of the most beautiful places on Earth. Heading out to the backcountry for a few days, I don’t realize how much I miss Clarendon until I return — perhaps dropping back into Yosemite Valley or coming around a bend at the Natural Arches — when it reminds me not to feed the bears.

So I was shocked when I learned from the NY Times Magazine story “The Road to Clarity” that the National Park Service has decided to phase out Clarendon, replacing it on all their signage with the newly designed NPS Rawlinson. Now Rawlinson’s not bad, but… it’s just not Clarendon. A Transportation Research Board publication claims that Rawlinson “requires less horizontal sign space than Clarendon while improving sign readability and retaining Clarendon’s unique signature quality.” I don’t doubt that Rawlinson uses less space, but it does so by using completely different letterforms, thereby retaining nothing of Clarendon’s “unique signature quality,” whatever that means. (Besides, if two typefaces share a “signature quality,” then it’s not “unique” anymore, is it?)

But I’m just being grumpy. Every time I’ve been in some truly breathtaking place (in this country), Clarendon has been there, too. So I associate the two, and, in my mind, Clarendon has a great “brand”: It’s outdoors, rugged, strong, awe-inspiring, fresh, clean and invigorating. Clarendon is solid, liquid, mossy, foggy, windswept and out-cropped. Rawlinson is none of that, and will never become that, at least not for me, in my lifetime.

But hey, at least the NPS didn’t choose Myriad. I’m hoping and praying that this sign was a mistake. (Note to NPS designers: Use “create outlines” before sending your PDF to the sign shop!)