It never ceases to amaze me how the city can always find the funds to replace street name signs that don’t need replacing, but our potholes go unfilled.
I’m also dazzled by the variety of typefaces the DPW sign shop uses on our signs. Someone’s quietly working their way through all of the typefaces in their fonts menu. They’ve gone past “C” already, so some kind soul must have deleted Comic Sans before they got to it.
This sign replaced a legible one within the past couple of months:
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a “Hearts & Serifs” cabal in this city’s administration. The above sign certainly has serifs and a heart, but flies in the face of the most frequent excuse I’ve heard for unnecessary sign replacement — that the street name needs to be in uppers & lowers, not all uppercase like the trusty signs of yore. Hey, at least there’s one lowercase letter on that sign.
Just up the street from there are two signs that were replaced a couple of years ago:
Worcester’s certainly not hung up on consistency. We’ve spiced up our Times New Roman here with a dash of Helvetica Bold in uppercase. Too bad they didn’t check the bottom one’s spelling against their own street listing — it should be “DiGregorio”. not Digregorio.
Some signs just leave me scratching my head. Here’s a sign they put up this winter:
The uppercase “AVE” looks like quite the afterthought. That sign replaced one that looked like this:
The latter may be a bit unexciting, but it was effective. With marching orders & a bottomless budget from on high, though, there’s no limit to what the DPW can spend on sign replacement, nor are there any standards or guidelines to which they are being held. There’s a persistent nagging from downtown to get hearts & serifs up for some peculiarly OCD reason, but the folks at the sign shop take every other creative license possible as they festoon our street corners with every imaginable signage variation, while the taxpayer foots the bill.
Is it just latent creativity that’s behind this, or is the sign shop revolting against its taskmasters in some sort of passive-aggressive quest to embarrass the “Hearts & Serifs” gang downtown?
Nicole, Worcester 