Monocle’s Stella Roos reflects on the stylistic choices found on the road signs that pepper Europe’s highways. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is Monocle on Design Extra.
It's a short show to accompany our weekly program where we discuss everything from architecture and craft to furniture and fashion.
I'm Maile Evans.
Road signage.
Whether permanent or temporary in nature, these graphic symbols are designed to keep drivers en route, alert of potential dangers, and to help weary travelers find their way.
Each nation has refined their own approach when it comes to choices and shape and colour.
But for more, let's join Monacle's design correspondent Stella Roos as she reflects on roadside design encountered on recent travel.
There is no better way to tell differences in national temperaments than to look at the design of mundane, everyday objects.
This year I've been lucky enough, or foolhardy, you might say, to have taken a couple longer road trips across Europe, and I can now report that one great example of this is road signage.
I started out driving through France.
The French love their roundabouts and in almost every one there will be a blue arrow pointed to tout direction or all directions in large capital letters.
It is not unusual to find that there is another sign below pointed the other way and instructively labeled autre direction or other directions.
It's definitely a poetic take.
Existentialist, you might say.
Spare a thought for us banal people hoping to get from A to B or even just to exit the roundabout.
Eventually, I did make it across the border into Spain.
All that driving in circles had put me behind schedule and it was already late when I got on the A9 headed south to Barcelona.
Helpfully, Spaniards are alerted when they enter an accident prone stretch of highway with an extra large reflective plaque that declares a zona de concentration.
A few kilometers later, there is another plaque informing drivers that the zone of concentration has now ended.
It's time for a siesta at the wheel, I guess.