One afternoon on BBC Radio 4, I happened to catch an interview with Margaret Calvert. No, I didn't recognize the name, either, but I've always burned to know it. I certainly knew her work. And so do you, if you've ever driven around England. She designed many of the country's road signs.

 

Like this one, for instance:

The School sign. A straightforward, simple message. A job of work. A datum. No room for artistic license here. Certainly not the place for politics or polemic. Right? Hahaha! Fool!

Here's what Margaret has to say about it:

"There were pictograms of children on European signs, but they were often crudely drawn by engineers. There were some illustrated school signs in England, but they used to be of a boy of about ten with a satchel and a cap, and a small girl behind him.

"It was quite archaic, almost like an illustration from Enid Blyton, and very grammar-schooly. I wanted to make it more inclusive, because comprehensives were starting up, and I didn't want it to have a social class feel."

Inclusive. Yes, that's the word. Satchel and a cap? Intolerable symbols of class privilege. And we can't have boys leading girls 'round by the hand, now can we?

"I switched it to make the girl more caring, with her leading a little boy."

Caring. Yes, that means "bigger and bossier."

Why am I so exercised about this? I'm not, really. Not about this one. Oh, it depresses me that there is no task so straightforward that our busybody social engineers won't use it as a teaching opportunity. It depresses me that this thing is so ubiquitous and so damn ugly. It depresses me when a job as plain and workmanlike as road signage is draped in the mantle of high art. It's positively Soviet, this slobbering over the industrial and the ordinary.

Calvert was later appointed head of graphic design at the Royal College of Art. Feh.

 

But exercised? No, I save my spleen for THIS one:

This thing was designed by somebody. It was approved by somebody. Then it was passed to a committee of somebodies, who passed it on to a company of signmakers, who churned out thousands of them, that this nation of 60 million somebodies drives past every day and has driven past every day for four decades. Am I really the only person who sees this thing and feels like her head is going to explode with graphics rage?

Yeah, that's right. Graphics rage. Savor it.

 

Here. Let's put it next to the American version and see if you can spot the problem.

Nooo, the problem is not that the greedy American is using more than his fair share of earth's resources by driving a honking huge double-wide Buick and not even carpooling. But, hey, nice try, you hippie dipshit.

The American version — however inelegant an example of the illustrator's art it may be — does not violate the laws of god and man.

The British version, on the other hand, says "this is a patch of road so damn slippery that the wheels on the right of the car have come clean off, sailed over and attached themselves to the left of the car, while the wheels on the left of the car have miraculously flown over and installed themselves on the right. And that's some kind of slippery!"

 

<< Thusly. So if you're that CSI:Miami guy — or whatever that cop show is with the dude with the sunglasses — and somebody hands you this picture and asks you to reconstruct the accident, you're going to whip off those shades and say it had to be something like this. >>

And then you're going to pluck out your eyeballs and grind them under your bootheel, because they're ruined now.

Now, I'm not positive Margaret herself designed the slippery sign. I'm pretty sure she copped to it on that radio program, but I can't find the audio on the BBC site.

She was part of a complete redesign of British road signs that happened in the early '60s. Signage was a total mess by the middle of the 20th Century. It had developed randomly and haphazardly, parallel with the automobile. During the second war, Britain even deliberately screwed up some of their road signs, just to give Jerry a run for his money if ever he came ashore.

After the war, committees were formed to study the problem, and designer Jock Kinneir was appointed to create the signs. Margaret Calvert was a former student of his and a business partner. In the course of the project, they studied European road signage, and I've seen the slippery sign laid at Europe's door (incompetence? Europe? Unpossible!).

YES, it matters. It speaks to the general competence of...everything. If something can be this wrong and this visible for this long without anyone putting the brakes on, it brings the whole creaky, pasted together mechanism of society into question. I'm serious.

We count on each other to provide a basic level of competence in whatever it is we do. And we count on all of us to pay attention and flag it when we see the competence slip. It has been desirable always; it is vital in a technological age. This howler of a farce of a cock-up is like finding out the man who designed the braking system in my car believes that two plus two equals potato.

You people really let me down this time.