“What Font is That?”

As we were on press with the new Field Notes “National Parks” Edition Series E 3-Packs, Jim had the idea to make a water-transfer decal based on park signage, typesetting “America’s Best Idea”—paraphrasing a Wallace Stegner quote — in the rustic script typeface found on such signs.

A little research online found a lot of people in a lot of threads asking “What font is that?,” then a couple posts from people who had tried to emulate it as a digital typeface and gave up. So it wasn’t going to be as easy as downloading a free font from a shady website, we were going to have to go back to the source.

More research led to a variety of official government documents regarding park signage. Last Spring, the Federal Highway Adminstration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (2009, revised 2012) provided us with 862 pages and several hours of reading pleasure that was indispensable in our production of the “Mile Marker” Edition. This time I found a trilogy of equally engaging publications:

The National Sign Handbook, (Bureau of Land Management, September 2016, 118 pages) is a handsome document full of excellent color diagrams of park signage, but did not cover National Parks themselves, which have their own signage system. 

NPS UniGuide Standards, (National Park Service, June, 2002, 931 pages) was getting closer. After a couple dozen pages of dry text, it features all the diagrams, tables, and charts you’d hope for, as well as a series of wonderful watercolor-ish illustrations by an unnamed artist. The deeper I dug, the more admiration I had for the team that put together this comprehensive and attractive document. The last 60 pages are nothing but National Park and Monument names carefully typeset on a grid, showing appropriate scaling and line breaks, in Adobe Frutiger and NPS Rawlinson, the typeface created by Terminal Design to replace the parks’ traditional Clarendon. All this, but still no sign of the wonky script we were looking for, nor the trapezoidal signs Jim and I had in mind.

Finally, I found Sign and Poster Guidelines for the Forest Service (US Dept. of Agriculture Forest Service, October 2013, 681 pages). This manual was less polished than the other two, borrowing a lot of information from the aforementioned “standards” are a little less standard, with a mishmash of DOT signage and other influences. The Forest Service seems to be full of wild cards. I had a feeling I was on the right track.

Scrolling through (I’d long ago given up reading these behemoths page by page), on page 1-14, there was my first breakthrough, a trapezoidal sign with “National Forest” in that glorious script. I proceeded forward, hoping for a better reference and some background info on the lettering. Just a few pages letter, I hit the motherlode, page 1-18 included examples of the script, reproduced clearly. Scrolling back a page I learned they are considered  “Logotypes.” and only six uses were allowed (National Forests, National Grasslands, National Recreation Areas, National Monuments, National Volcanic Monuments, and Wilderness Areas). Furthermore, they specifically state “Logotypes are drawings and have not been created from a standard font.” This statement made me chuckle, because any designer who has ever designed a logo gets an email from the client asking “What font is that?” because they want to use their logo typeface for everything else, too, which is generally a terrible idea unless your logo is in Futura.

So again, as I figured, it wasn’t going to be easy. They were drawn “by hand.” But this was a big breakthrough. I was finally able to get a really clear look at them and see that they very clearly “aren’t a font.” The letters were wildly inconsistent in the best of ways. The baselines and x-height and the ways letters were connected were reminiscent of handwriting, not a digital script font.

Better still, they were vector files! I could (using secret designer technology) extract them from the PDF and have crisp, editable outlines to work with, rather than trying to re trace it or ‘paint’ it as a bitmap. Vector is my jam.

Mysteries remained! Even though words and parts of words (notably “National”) were reused in different logotypes, they were awkwardly stretched in different instances. While most were ‘flattened’ into compound paths, the single word “Volcanic” (maybe a newer addition?) was made up of individual letters and was drawn lighter than the others, with an outline applied to give it the same weight. I sent a message to Jim…

I’m pretty sure it’s one or the other, and I say that with the greatest love and respect for anyone involved in making these perfectly imperfect blobs of text.

In any case, I had what I needed to make my own logotype with bits and pieces of the existing characters and some freestyle vector work. I was able to find or adapt most of the letters I needed (the capital B being the hardest to make from scratch) and in many cases I was able to find strings of two or three consecutive letters to preserve the connecting swashes. Best of all, I was able to use different examples of different letters across the text, allowing me to retain the goofy inconsistency that brought us all here in the first place. So in the end, it didn’t take long to whip up the blurb of text we wanted, which was good, because I’d spent a ton of time reading all those manuals, and the decal art was due to be shipped.

We took a few color, shape, and type (Futura!) liberties to ensure it was the perfect balance of park signage and Field Notes-y-ness, and sent it off to Art Decal Enterprises to do their water-transfer magic. We hope you enjoy that little scrap of repurposed goofy American type as much as we do.

Update: Here's an April 12, 2021 Atlas Obscura story about U.S. Forest Service Ranger Virgil ”Bus” Carell, who was largely responsible for the distinctive U.S.F.S. signage program starting in the 1950s, along with graphic designer and “Smokey the Bear” creator Rudy Wendelin. Did Wendelin draw the original lettering?

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These old school, permanent, water-transfer decals are available for purchase and are perfect for your car, camper, or Conestoga wagon. Also, check out our “National Parks” Edition.