Stylogeny combining British Road Signage × Nutri-Score

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Style combination · Pairs well

British Road Signage × Nutri-Score

Both are public signs built from a manual of fixed sizes, colours and clear zones; take the road-sign discipline when a colour-scale rating has to be applied by thousands of firms without drifting.

From the research on Nutri-Score (Front-of-Pack Colour-Grade Label)

Mix them and make something British Road Signage Nutri-Score

ORDERBritish Road Signage × Nutri-Score1958 · 2017
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from British Road Signage, their arrangement from Nutri-Score, the finish from British Road Signage. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert) Nutri-Score (Front-of-Pack Colour-Grade Label)

Type from Nutri-Score
Colour from British Road Signage
Form from British Road Signage
Composition from Nutri-Score
Surface from British Road Signage

02

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Nutri-Score

Order

Jost, standing in for The logo's own lettering: a heavy geometric sans in capitals for the grey 'NUTRI-SCORE' heading and the white and tinted A–E grades, supplied only as vector outlines in the charter's Illustrator files; the charter's rule is 'Don't change fonts'

Text · British Road Signage

The national sign system Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert designed for Britain's motorways, first used on the Preston By-pass in 1958, and through the Worboys Committee for all roads from 1 January 1965. Place names are set in mixed case in their Transport lettering, spaced on tiles measured in stroke widths. Colour codes the road (blue motorway, green primary with yellow numbers, white local, brown for tourism from the mid-1980s), red triangles warn and circles command with Calvert's pictograms, and junctions are drawn as maps: a kit of parts written into law.

Inter; British Road Signage used Transport (Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, 1957–1963) and Motorway

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from British Road Signage, with a counter-accent from Nutri-Score. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert) Nutri-Score (Front-of-Pack Colour-Grade Label)

  • #ffffff ground · 36%
  • #111111 ink · 14%
  • #ffd200 accent · 18%
  • #ee8100 accent · 14%
  • #d6001c accent · 10%
  • #e63e11 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ffffff;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #ffd200;
  --accent-2: #ee8100;
  --accent-3: #d6001c;
  --accent-4: #e63e11;
  --font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert): These signs carry legal force: the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions prescribe them, so borrow the method (mixed case, colour and shape codes, a kit of parts) but never make a look-alike that a road user could take for a real traffic sign. The lettering is licensed too: GDS Transport is reserved for GOV.UK services, and New Transport is a commercial typeface from A2-Type.

Nutri-Score (Front-of-Pack Colour-Grade Label): Nutri-Score is an EU trade mark of Santé publique France, licensed to food firms only under its conditions of use, and a grade printed on a pack is a nutrition claim. Do not put the real logo or a convincing imitation on products, mock-ups or generated images in a way that could pass for a genuine score; for fictional or teaching work, change the name or say clearly that the grade is illustrative, and check the current algorithm before showing any real product's letter.

04

The two styles

A blue, green and white road-style sign reads “Take a break” above a large parking symbol, a tree and a picnic table. Four smaller panels show toilets, a cup, cutlery and a fuel pump, with “2 miles” and a right-pointing arrow below. 1958–present · Western Europe British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert) The national sign system Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert designed for Britain's motorways, first used on the Preston By-pass in 1958, and through the Worboys Committee for all roads from 1 January 1965. Place names are set in mixed case in their Transport lettering, spaced on tiles measured in stroke widths. Colour codes the road (blue motorway, green primary with yellow numbers, white local, brown for tourism from the mid-1980s), red triangles warn and circles command with Calvert's pictograms, and junctions are drawn as maps: a kit of parts written into law. A poster headed “BALANCED BOWL” shows an overhead illustration of a bowl filled with leafy greens, carrot strips, chickpeas, sliced tomatoes, cucumbers and grains. Below it is a green-to-red A–E rating scale with B highlighted, followed by five circular food icons. 2017–present · Western Europe, Central Europe, Southern Europe Nutri-Score (Front-of-Pack Colour-Grade Label) A small, fixed public-health sign that grades a whole food instead of warning about one nutrient. A white rounded box holds a grey 'NUTRI-SCORE' heading in heavy geometric capitals over five tiles from dark green A to dark orange E; the product's own letter swells into a taller capsule with a white keyline while the other four letters fade to tints. Owned as a trade mark by Santé publique France and voluntary, it is built from fixed modules, six fixed colours and a minimum size, and sits in the lower third of the pack front.

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More combinations

With British Road Signage

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