The history of British road signs At speed, though, the visual shape of a word in mixed case lettering helps its recognition: "Birmingham" is more swiftly absorbed than "BIRMINGHAM," for instance. This was one of the deciding factors in favour of Kinneir, as well as a more nebulous recognition that his proposals fitted into an aesthetic that was more distinctly European. The EEC was in its infancy, and Britain had high hopes of one day joining; even our motorway verges would declare that we're all Europeans now. As only an eight-mile dual carriageway, our first motorway was hardly the grand stage for Kinneir's masterplan of a more streamlined roadscape. The following year presented him with that in the shape of the first 72-mile section of the M1. The gleaming new road was a huge hit, a day out in itself for many, and its bold blue signs, with their giant white lettering, fitted the futuristic feel perfectly. Kinneir, and his former student Margaret Calvert, were charged by Worboys to take the rules of their motorway signage system and apply it throughout the entire road network. As on the motorway signs, the main features were a mixture of upper and lower case lettering in a clear sans serif font, installed on direction signs that resembled a simple map oriented towards the driver. The font, based on an early 20th century German typeface called Aksidenz Grotesk, became known as Transport, and has been called "the handwriting of Britain." The effect was calm and cool, and instantly made the country's creaking, potholed roads look just that little bit more modern. It wasn't just direction and junction signs that came under Kinneir and Calvert's beady gaze. Worboys demanded new instruction and warning signs, too. These were codified into a system of pictograms, many inspired by or adapted from those in use on the continent. There were also homegrown touches. For the sign warning of an imminent school, Calvert sneaked in a wry nod to the age: gone was the Enid Blytonesque boy in shorts and a cap, to be replaced by a thoroughly modern little miss, based on a photo of Calvert herself as a young girl, pulling along her smaller brother. Prior to Worboys, many such signs in Britain depended on the literal spelling out, in words, of the danger ahead. The stark new pictograms with their bold red edging fitted an era that was beginning to take graphic design far more seriously and even spawned their own jokes and mythology (the "man at work" trying to unfurl his umbrella, for instance, the "beware low-flying motorcycles" sign or the impossible cross-over tyre-marks of the skidding car). The original colour schemes have stuck, too. From the outset, the motorways have been signed in white lettering on a blue background, like the sky of a summer's day. Before long, our road maps followed suit, making light blue the default colour for the depiction of motorways. Primary destinations on main roads are shown as white on green, with yellow used for the road numbers, and all other minor places and routes are shown as black on white - these colour schemes have also transmuted on to most maps, both paper and electronic. Even the mapping employed by satnavs, a stylised version of the road from the viewpoint bottom centre of the driver, harks back to the very first motorway signs of Kinneir and Calvert. In many ways, the clear use of fonts, consistency of colour coding and simple pictograms were the heralds of our passage into the computer age, which has made us all so much more instinctively symbol-savvy. As motoring has become more complicated, the signs have had to be adapted for many uses that Kinneir and Calvert could never have anticipated, but it is testament to the power of their design that the system has coped admirably, has been copied all over the world and after more than half a century in use, still looks fit for purpose today. In the 1980s, a government review concluded that the Worboys system was still working well, and could only make one small change in the addition of the white-on-brown signs for tourist information, another direct import from the continent. Their system has undoubtedly helped road safety: there are three times as many vehicles on the road today than the 12 million when the Worboys report was enacted, yet the number of deaths is less than a quarter of what it was then. It is all too easy to take for granted the design of what we might call the wallpaper of life - elements such as our maps, our roads and their signs. These are things more often in the background, quietly doing their job and only really noticed if they fail to do so properly. Their greatest ambition is to be ignored, for then they are working well. Our road signs most definitely fall into this rather rare and lovely category. Few people know the names of Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, but their artistic legacy is ubiquitous, and their gallery is our entire built environment. Mike Parker is the author of Mapping the Roads, an illustrated history of our road network and how it has been mapped, out now from AA Publishing