Snippets from America - National Forest typeface

We’re travelling in the USA and I was intending to write a number of blogs along I the way but there is something wrong with the blogger interface on the iPad which means you can’t see more than one page of text, so, rather than beat my head against a brick wall I have decided to keep my posts short. This will no doubt come as good news all round. 

One of the first things I noticed on our travels was a simple typeface used on signs in the National Parks. When I saw this sign in the Sequoia National Forest it gave rise to a whole flood of memories and impressions. The style of lettering seems so familiar, old-fashioned and oddly reassuring and yet where do these memories originate? Could it have been in old, secondhand copies of the National Geographic magazine, pored over in dentists’ waiting rooms? Or was it in an old film from the 50s? Whatever the answer, it is one that is coloured in hues of Kodachrome.