Feral Highway Abomination (sign edits and/or stickers)

[iliana]

I have a bit of a special interest in road sign design.



I've been doing this as a bit for a little while and have been slowly getting better / more accurate at it. I'm still figuring out my editing workflow a bit but I'll post some "remastered" signs I've made in the past in this thread soon™.

When I posted this edit of the "NEW" conspicuity placard one though I realized I could probably make scaled down stickers. (i mean, unless someone really wants a 12x30-inch sticker)

So that's been one of my distraction projects with many sidequests recently. The plan is to print onto adhesive clear inkjet film and adhere that onto an actual retroreflective sign material to give it the right "aesthetic", then put a UV-protective sheet on top of that. Here's some progress photos of color tests I'm doing:



The top-most reflective sheeting here is a little too extreme for sticker purposes, honestly. I'm pretty sure it's an Avery Dennison retroreflective sheeting based on the pattern but I'm not sure which one. Works fine for signs at real scale (or just to have white retroreflective markers for visibility purposes) but not for this project. The bottom two sheets use 3M "Engineer Grade Prismatic" sheeting which seems way better for this particular application. More on that later.

A fun thing is the difference between the buses only sign at the bottom right and the school speed limit sign on the other side of that sample. I had printed both from the FHWA's new digital files, trying to remember to correct the colors to ones I had been testing elsewhere; on the school speed limit sign I remembered to completely remove the white background, but I forgot on the buses only sign, and the printer (an 8-ink Pixma Pro-100) actually printed a very light gray there when the driver mapped whatever colorspace it got from Affinity Publisher into the internal colorspace. I also forgot to knock out the white background on the STOP sign but that's less noticeable particularly at this resolution.

Sign sheeting generally has its own adhesive on the back so you can stick it onto a steel or aluminum backing, and that is necessarily going to be different from "normal" stickers, so these are some photos of me testing the adhesive on a ThinkPad. I left it on for a few days, then attempted to remove and re-place the sticker. It does come up with some effort but it's really easy to accidentally separate the retroreflective from its adhesive, and the fact that I'm planning to add two layers on top of that probably won't help things. But it does come up and doesn't leave any stickiness behind and even still re-adheres, although I don't know how reliable it is after being stuck a second time. (In the second photo you can see where it was, and I think that is simply the sticker lifting up some of the grime that laptops acquire over several years of service.)



You can also see some slight damage to the print (see the first O in SCHOOL). This is the main reason I'm going to try a protective sheeting to go on top of the stickers and hopefully "seal" the edges a bit; the transparent film I'm using doesn't like to be trifled with or to be wet. Also maybe I won't cut these out and corner them with a pair of scissors.

There is also the overall question of "what color are road signs anyway", which is an in-progress side quest I'll hopefully post about once I have some more data. The summary is that sign colors are really inconsistent and this knowledge may bother you as you are in a car in the future. Apologies!

In conclusion, let me into your sign shop I am normal and can be trusted with your plotter.

[Skirmisher]

Yesssss sign stickers with an actual retroreflective layer is such a cool idea!!

[lifning]

actually having the same visual properties is incredible.

i would love to see one of these posing next to its full-sized companion in a "don't talk to me or my son ever again" fashion

[iliana]

i would love to see one of these posing next to its full-sized companion in a "don't talk to me or my son ever again" fashion

Particularly since these are probably going to be somewhere between 1:15 and 1:20 scale. I printed a standard 36x36 diamond sign at 1:12 scale to test some stuff today and it still felt uncomfortably large.

[snow]

Looking at the sticker on your laptop, I feel like the form factor of a standard Speed Limit sign would be perfect to replace one of those "$cpu_arch inside" stickers and confuse the heck out of someone ten years from now.

[lifning]

Looking at the sticker on your laptop, I feel like the form factor of a standard Speed Limit sign would be perfect to replace one of those "$cpu_arch inside" stickers and confuse the heck out of someone ten years from now.

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20 MHZ SPEED LIMIT
WATCH FOR CHILDREN