Gary Yau | Hong Kong Road Signs and Prison Gothic Font Preservation
Gary Yau, a Hongkonger in his 20s, created the “Road Research Society” in 2016. He has spent several years cataloguing the remaining 500-600 road signs featuring Hong Kong’s unique bilingual “Prison Gothic” font and have reproduced this font in published books and online posts that share information regarding roadways.
“The construction of traditional characters is inherently quite complex and the distance between pen strokes is very small. This dense spatial relationship manifests in our signage as it does in our urban landscape. At the same time, Prison Gothic contains different styles of writing for Chinese words, while maintaining the legibility and ease of recognition required: it’s a rather fine font for road signs. ”
Journalist: Silenceisblue, WWood
Translator: Alex Rednaxela
Editorial: Zucchhi
Photographer: SL
“So-Called Bus Spotters”
I’ve loved taking the bus since I was young and taking in the views passing by and the characters and designs along the roads. I remember my Dad giving me a copy of “Walking With Fonts: a Study of Chinese Typefaces in Daily Life,” which inspired my interest both in observing the typography around Hong Kong and font design in general.
In recent years, while photographing road signs and conducting research, I’ve unexpectedly made many like-minded friends and the Road Research Society has slowly grown from there. It began with road signs which triggered my interest in other road elements such as their design and the reproduction of “Prison Gothic” etc. At the same time, because we’re sharing information about road signs and other tidbits online, we’ve actually garnered attention and a very positive response from lots of internet users. With all this, we’ve far exceeded the boundaries and imaginations of the so-called “bus spotters”.
The Function of Road Signs and the Use of Typography
In general, Hong Kong’s road design originates from British principles, but with consistent localisation, it has come to take on many Hong Kong characteristics.
On public roads, road signs have to be visible and clear, providing accurate information for drivers to arrive at their destinations safely and smoothly while also improving the flow of traffic.
The English road typeface “Transport” was born in Britain in 1957 and was quickly put to use throughout the roadways. The design of “Transport” emphasises readability with clear, thick lines led by strong iconography that allows drivers to make out information from a distance.
I have experience driving in both Australia and Hong Kong and I would say that overall, road sign information in Hong Kong is very good, but it’s somewhat lacking in Australia. In Australia, road signs are in capital letters and from a distance, it’s a blurry mess of lettering clumped together and difficult to read clearly. On the other hand, the English lettering on Hong Kong’s road signs uses a combination of capitals and small letters in the Transport font. For Chinese characters, Taiwan’s “Quanzhen Dark Bold” or Hong Kong’s own “Prison Gothic” are used so that information is clearly displayed and easily read and understood.
Similarities and Differences Between Road Signs in Hong Kong and the UK
Credit: Road Research Society
Though the Hong Kong road signage system originated in Britain, there are many differences between the two. Firstly, Hong Kong’s signs all have traditional Chinese characters laid against the English. Secondly, motorway signage in Hong Kong is green, while standard roads are blue, but in the UK, it’s the very opposite. What explains this? In Britain, most motorways run through forests and the countryside and so blue was chosen to avoid all the colours blending together. As to the reason why Hong Kong is the opposite, we haven’t been able to verify from official sources, but have made a few discoveries of our own in doing a little research.
Before 1965, Hong Kong didn’t have any such thing as motorways. It was only following the economic development of that era that any need for such high speed roads arose. In 1994, the Transport Department decided that Hong Kong’s motorways would use green, and not the British blue. We figure that this decision was made in order to avoid being wasteful and swapping all the blue signs already being used for standard roads to green ones en masse.
The interesting thing is, in not following British signage colours, Hong Kong road sign colours aligned with South Korea and Japan in yet another example of Hong Kong’s East meets West culture.
Hong Kong’s Unique “Prison Gothic” Signage
As the name suggests, Hong Kong’s unique “Prison Gothic” signage was created by prisoners, but there are no written records as to why this might be the case. Creating signage was the responsibility of the Correctional Services Department and included signs of places and common signs such as “No Entry”.
From a font perspective, Prison Gothic mixes old and new styles of writing characters, and it looks a bit like a crushed version of “Jinmei Dark Bold”. The manufacturing process of Prison Gothic signs had to go through many different people, and there were no computers back then so characters had to be cut by hand. The fact that they could create a unified style is pretty fascinating.
I think that Prison Gothic has its own pleasing aesthetic and style. The construction of traditional characters is inherently quite complex and the distance between pen strokes is very small. This dense spatial relationship manifests in our signage as it does in our urban landscape. At the same time, Prison Gothic contains different styles of writing for Chinese words, while maintaining the legibility and ease of recognition required: it’s a rather fine font for road signs.
At the same time, Prison Gothic bears the marks of its age as evidenced by its exaggerated “flared mouth”. Prison Gothic is originally a relatively large font with enough room to deal with fine strokes, but the font still has this flared mouth look. This likely originates from the large letterpresses at printing houses at the time.
I first began to research Prison Gothic during university. Though I was in Australia, I found plenty of reference material online and carried out a little bit of research. I slowly began to piece together the design and evolution of Hong Kong’s roads. In doing so, my fellow members and I became increasingly interested in Hong Kong’s road design and road sign typography history.
Credit: Road Research Society
How to Protect Prison Gothic
Credit: Road Research Society
There are around 13000 general Chinese characters and about 7000 in common use. My team members and I are working hard to create a library of Prison Gothic characters for the 7000 common characters. Throughout this process, the biggest issue has been that an overwhelming number of these road signs contain place and road names and actually rather few common characters. As a result, we have to create characters by reproducing and mixing elements from the existing library. We will usually photograph to produce a record and then and then do the tracing, adjustments and composition on the computer.
Another difficulty is that there are only 500-600 Prison Gothic street signs left in Hong Kong. We have to rush to photograph and record each remaining road sign before they’re replaced with something new.
A while ago, I published a book recording the roads of Hong Kong and their many changes. In a related exhibition at Tai Kwun, research into Prison Gothic was among the exhibits. All of this becomes part of the historic record for Prison Gothic.
Updating to New Road Signs = Progress?
With every new set of road work, old Prison Gothic signs are silently replaced, vanishing into history, but the greatest pity of all is that these already endangered road signs can unexpectedly “run into trouble”. For example, a year ago, there was controversy surrounding the accuracy of “Long” (朗) in a sign for Yuen Long (元朗) and the character was covered up. Even though a long and complicated procedure ruled that the “Long” was not incorrectly written at all, the covering has not been removed and it’s just such an eyesore. In all honesty, it’s known that Chinese characters have many different writing styles: must we be such a stickler for things?
With the principle of road standards in mind, if the sign is in good condition and does not constitute a danger, and the information it contains is still accurate, there is absolutely no need to replace it.
Which Years Produced the Finest Signs?
After 2010, there was an obvious increase in the quality of signage design. Tuen Mun Road and Tolo Highway are both good examples. These road signs are a lovely green, make use of the Transport font, provide clear information and are typeset very well.
Which Years Produced the Worst Signs?
We believe it to be the signage created between 1996 and 2010. Between these years, everything from colouring to typesetting was less than ideal. They even used Arial instead of Transport. The reason for this was possibly because computers were starting to be used for signage design and there was no support for Transport, so they had no choice but to use Arial. It might also be because lots of civil servants left their jobs around 1997 so the resulting design quality suffered.
Out with the old and in with the new is a reality that all cities have to face. This handover between old and new provides the perfect opportunity for us to investigate Hong Kong’s signage and unique urban visual signature.
“I am Gary Yau. I am a HKer.”
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