Project Overview

Digitalized text from old road signs in HK to preserve visual cultural memories of the city

Organisation

Road Research Society

Team

Ho Man (Thomas) Ng
Yick Cheung Gary Yau

Project Brief

Gary Yao and his team at the Road Research Institute launched the Prison Gothic Revival Program (監獄體重現計劃), a project to record the “prison font” of the hand-made street signs found in Hong Kong and digitise it into a font to use online.
reanimate the old style of Chinese characters and preserve one of the visual cultural memories of Hong Kong."
It is based on characters written by Chinese prisoners for Hong Kong's street signs

Design Challenge

"The biggest challenge is to expand the character set to cover some 98 per cent of the most-used words in Chinese," said Yau.
"The original characters on road signs are usually place names and regulatory messages with approximately 500 characters, which make up less than 10 per cent of the generally used character set. Therefore, we took time and effort to expand the character set to 8,000 Chinese characters."
According to Yau, old signs in Hong Kong are being replaced by the Chinese government's highway department because it believes that some of the handwritten text is incorrect.

As a consequence, the original signs are becoming harder to find. He cites the debate over how to write the Chinese character Long 朗 as an example.

Effectiveness

Road Research Society is currently crowdsourcing the funds to make the font available to web users around the world.