A sign is dated by its shape before anyone reads a word of it

① The one-line version

Three reforms did most of the work. In 1965 Britain moved the message from a plate hung under the shape to inside the shape. In 1954 America made the STOP sign red. In 2010 Europe replaced the orange square on a chemical label with a red diamond. Get those three right and a sign reads as the year you want before anybody looks at the lettering.

② Britain: two plates on a post, then one sign

The single most useful thing to know about a British road sign is that before 1965 it was usually two objects. The 1904 patterns gave you a shape — a hollow red triangle for caution, a solid red disc for a prohibition, a hollow white ring for a speed limit — and the message went on a separate rectangular plate bolted underneath it. Worboys put the symbol inside the shape and threw the plate away.

Date	What the sign physically was
1904 Motor Car Act 1903; Heavy Motor-car Order 1904	Four patterns. Prohibition = solid red disc, 18 in. Speed limit = hollow white ring, 18 in. Caution = hollow red equilateral triangle, 18 in sides, open, with nothing inside it. Other notices = diamond boards. The wording lives on a rectangular plate below the shape.
1921 Maybury Committee, Form 39	Eight standard rectangular warning plates, 12 in × 21 in, with symbols borrowed from continental practice, hung beneath the 1904 open triangle.
1933 Traffic Signs Provisional Regulations 1933	Symbol plates formalised; reflex buttons added for night visibility. Ends the era of signs put up by the motoring clubs in their own liveries.
1934–35	The 30 mph built-up limit sign; Belisha beacons — amber globe on a black-and-white striped post.
1950	A new No Entry; the inverted triangle within a ring for Major Road Ahead — the first British sign in the give-way family.
1 March 1957 SI 1957/13	Warning symbols redrawn. School changes from the flaming torch of knowledge to a schoolboy and schoolgirl. Crossroads changes from an “X” to a “+”. A hard cut worth knowing if the scene is dated either side of it.
1 January 1965 TSRGD 1964, SI 1964/1857	Worboys. Triangle warns, circle orders, rectangle informs; the symbol goes inside the shape; sentence case replaces capitals; the octagonal STOP replaces the HALT disc and the inverted red-bordered triangle becomes GIVE WAY. Designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. Nothing shot as pre-1965 Britain may carry a Worboys sign.
3 November 1975 SI 1975/1536	Supersedes the Anderson motorway system; the “series of bends” sign is removed.
12 August 1994 SI 1994/1519	White-on-brown tourist signs prescribed; metric supplementary plates allowed on height restrictions; the Guildford Rules implemented. Pre-1964 direction signs had to be gone by 1 January 2005, blue-bordered local direction signs by 1 January 2015.
31 January 2003 SI 2002/3113	Black-on-yellow roadworks signs. Before this they are black on white.
22 April 2016 SI 2016/362	Major overhaul; Scottish Gaelic permitted in Scotland; councils may erect STOP signs without the Secretary of State; dual metric and imperial on height and width restrictions.

Lettering. Transport was designed 1957–63 by Kinneir and Calvert, tested on the Preston By-pass in 1958 and rolled out on the M1 in 1959. New Transport is 2012, by Henrik Kubel with Margaret Calvert — a sign set in New Transport cannot predate 2012.

Street nameplates are not traffic signs in law — no TSRGD control, hence the variation. The Ministry adopted David Kindersley’s alphabet in 1950; that Trajan-derived serif is near-universal on British estates of the 1970s to 1990s. Westminster adopted Misha Black’s Univers-Condensed alphabet in 1967.

③ America: the year the STOP sign turned red

An American STOP sign is black or red on yellow from 1924 to 1954 — not for style, but because fade-resistant red sheeting did not exist. Red with white letters arrives with the 1954 revision, and non-conforming yellow signs were finally cleared by 1966.

Edition	What changes on the sign
1935 · first MUTCD	Regulatory signs are black on white rectangles; STOP is a black-on-yellow octagon; warning is the yellow diamond. The three-colour signal is standardised.
1942 · War Emergency	Reflectorised glass beads required in pavement markings. STOP is still yellow.
1948	A standard rounded-letter alphabet for all signs — the ancestor of Highway Gothic. The FHWA Series A–F were drawn during the war and published in 1948.
1954	STOP becomes white on red. White-on-green adopted for Interstate guide signs. The YIELD sign enters the Manual — as a keystone.
1961	Uniform construction-zone signing; the pedestrian signal’s WAIT becomes DON’T WALK.
1971	Orange for construction signing. All guide signs white-on-green. YIELD becomes the red-and-white inverted triangle. The Manual states a preference for symbols over words.
1978	That preference quietly disappears — word warning signs stay legitimate right through the 1980s, which is the opposite of what most period props assume.
December 2000 · Millennium	Lowercase added to every FHWA series; walking-person and upraised-hand symbols become mandatory on new pedestrian signals.
2009	Fluorescent yellow-green required for all school-zone warning signs. It was optional from 1998, so an FYG school sign cannot predate 1998.

The give-way. The first one was put up in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1950 by police officer Clinton Riggs, and it was a keystone. It entered the Manual in 1954 and stayed a keystone until 1971.

Clearview had interim approval from 2 September 2004, which was terminated on 25 January 2016 and reinstated on 28 March 2018. A Clearview guide sign dates a scene to 2004–2016 or after 2018.

What this studio will not draw. The Interstate shield is a registered trademark (Reg. 835,635, issued 19 September 1967). Sign Shop invents its own route series instead, and draws no real transit operator’s device or company mark anywhere.

④ The Vienna Convention, and why Ireland looks American

The conference sat in Vienna from 7 October to 8 November 1968; the Convention opened for signature on 8 November 1968 and entered into force on 6 June 1978. It permits two danger-warning systems, which is why a yellow diamond is not automatically American.

• System Aa — equilateral triangle, white or yellow ground, red border. The European norm.
• System Ab — diamond, yellow ground, black border. The American and Irish form.

The colloquial three families — triangle warns, circle orders, rectangle informs — are the Convention’s categories A–H in everyday dress. The United States is not a party, which is the root of every MUTCD divergence.

⑤ Greece: the orthography dates the sign

Date	What it changes
6 July 1974 ΦΕΚ Β´676/74	The first serious Greek signing standard, and the first gazette publication to carry sign diagrams. The Transport typeface, adapted to the Greek alphabet, has been standard since.
1976 / 1982	Demotic Greek becomes the official language in 1976; the polytonic system is abolished in 1982. A Greek sign with breathings and circumflexes on it is pre-1982. This is the strongest single dating tell in Greek props of any kind.
18 December 1986	Greece accedes to the Vienna Convention.
1987 ΕΛΟΤ 743	The romanisation on bilingual legends changes. “Athinai” reads as pre-1987; “Athina” reads as after. BGN/PCGN was in use until 1996 alongside it.
23 March 1999 Law 2696/1999, ΦΕΚ Α´57	The ΚΟΚ codified. Amended 2018 and 2025.

⑥ Safety signs: four systems, four looks

System	What it looks like, and when
OSHA 29 CFR 1910.145, 1971	Three words and no more: DANGER (red, white and black, in the oval bolt-head panel), CAUTION (yellow with black) and SAFETY INSTRUCTION. There is no WARNING and no NOTICE. A 1970s or 80s American factory sign should carry nothing else.
ANSI Z535 first published June 1991	The header-panel system: DANGER white on red, WARNING black on orange, CAUTION black on yellow, NOTICE white on blue, with the safety alert triangle on the first three. The orange WARNING panel and the blue NOTICE panel are post-1991 objects.
BS 5378 / the 1980 regs	The British house style before 1996 — a different running-man drawing and different arrow conventions from the ISO one.
1 April 1996 SI 1996/341	The Health and Safety (Safety Signs and Signals) Regulations 1996 revoke the 1980 Regulations outright and bring in the Directive 92/58/EEC colour code. A British workplace sign set changes visibly on this date.
ISO 7010 2003; registered signs 2011; BS EN from 2012	P prohibition (red circle, diagonal bar), M mandatory (solid blue circle), W warning (yellow triangle, rounded corners), E safe condition (green), F fire equipment (red). In a British interior the ISO look is post-2012 in practice.

The running man was designed by Yukio Ota in 1979, submitted to ISO in 1980 and adopted internationally in 1985. In an American interior it is an anachronism before the mid-2000s — the American norm is the word EXIT, and New York only began mandating the pictogram on high-rise fire doors in 2006.

The radiation trefoil was drawn at Berkeley in 1946, originally magenta on blue; the yellow field came later, and it was formalised as ISO 361 in 1974. The red ISO 21482 symbol — trefoil, skull and running figure — is 2007 or later, always. The biohazard symbol was designed by Charles Baldwin at Dow in 1966, published in Science in 1967 and made an ISO standard in 1986.

NFPA 704, the fire diamond, comes out of a 1959 incident in Charlotte and dates to 1960–61. Blue left is health, red top is flammability, yellow right is reactivity, white bottom is the special hazard — OX, a barred W, or SA.

⑦ The orange square and the red diamond

The clearest date on any chemical label in Europe. Directive 67/548/EEC gave a black symbol on an orange-yellow square with a letter code — E, O, F, T, C, Xn, Xi, N. CLP replaced it with the red-bordered white diamond.

Date	What is on the bottle
29 June 1967 – 2010	Orange square, black symbol, letter code.
1 December 2010	Substances must be labelled to CLP — the red diamond arrives.
1 June 2015	Mixtures follow. The old Directive ceases 31 May 2015.
1 June 2017	Sell-through ends — stock in the old livery could legitimately sit on a shelf until this date, which is a gift to a set dresser.
26 March 2012 · US	OSHA HazCom aligns with GHS; full compliance for manufacturers 1 June 2015.

Hazchem. The Emergency Action Code was devised by Charles Clisby of the London Fire Brigade after the Dudgeon’s Wharf disaster of 17 July 1969, developed by early 1973 and made mandatory in 1981. The British plate is 400 × 300 mm: EAC top left, UN number under it, emergency telephone number lower left, hazard diamond top right, consignor bottom right. The plain orange ADR plate — hazard identification number over UN number — takes over on international traffic through the 2004 and 2009 regulations.

⑧ What is on a British wall

Object	When it is right
Abstract of the Factories Act	Posted at the principal entrance from 1901 to the mid-1970s, with the district inspector’s name on it. Repealed away after HSWA 1974.
Fire certificate	1971–2006. The Fire Precautions Act 1971 required one; the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, in force 1 October 2006, abolished it.
Employers’ liability certificate	1 January 1972 onward. From 2008 it may be held electronically, so it starts leaving walls.
Health and Safety Law poster	1989, then the 1999 version with fill-in address boxes, then the 2009 redesign. A poster with write-in boxes is pre-2009; anything still up after 5 April 2014 is the 2009 design.
No-smoking sign, England	The A5 sign with the exact sentence “No smoking. It is against the law to smoke in these premises.” is a 1 July 2007 – 1 October 2012 object. After that, one legible sign, no prescribed wording. Scotland 26 March 2006, Wales 2 April 2007, Northern Ireland 30 April 2007.
Fire action notice	No prescribed wording has ever existed. Date it on the running-man drawing and on whether it says “Dial 999” or “Dial 999 or 112”.

Hospitals. HTM 65 (1984) prescribed brown and white — that palette is the single best dating tell for a British hospital corridor of the 1980s and early 90s. The NHS identity of 1999 brings blue (Pantone 300) and Frutiger, and the Wayfinding guidance of 1999, second edition 2005, supersedes HTM 65. So a corridor turns from brown to blue across 1999–2005.

⑨ The plate itself

The part a camera notices first, and the part most prop signage gets wrong by printing everything on the same flat vinyl.

• Vitreous enamel — a rolled lip at the edge, a glassy specular sheen, and chipping that goes through to dark metal from the fixing holes outward. The British standard before the war.
• Cast iron — a raised bead round the edge and relief lettering; fingerposts and older street nameplates.
• Painted aluminium — post-war, chalks rather than chips.
• Engineer-grade sheeting from the 1940s and diamond-grade from the 1990s — the bead sparkle is real and it is about 0.4 mm across, so it belongs in a 600 dpi print and not on a thumbnail.
• Engraved laminate — two-colour phenolic, for door plates and ward boards.

Sign Shop draws all of this at the size it is on the real plate, which is the right way round: weather that only shows when you print is weather that survives a close-up.

⑩ The money on the ticket

A price is a date stamp, and it is the one prop departments hand out without thinking. Three separate things can be wrong about “£16.99” on a 1932 card: the notation, the currency, and the amount.

Date	What a shop ticket says
to 14 February 1971 · UK	£sd. 240 pence to the pound, twelve to the shilling. Written 19/11, 1/6, and 1/– where the dash means nought pence. Cheap goods are priced to the halfpenny: 6½d. Sums over a pound were often written entirely in shillings — 98/– for £4 18s.
15 February 1971	Decimal Day. The pound keeps its value and is redivided into 100 new pence. The dual-pricing order flips on the day: before it, pre-decimal first with the new money in brackets — 1s (5p); after it, decimal first with the old in brackets — 5p (1s). That flip is the most precise dating detail available on a British shop prop.
1 January 2002 · Greece	Drachma to euro, at the fixed rate of 340.75 drachmas to one euro. A Greek shelf ticket with a euro sign on it cannot be older than 2002 — and a 1966 ticket should read in hundreds of drachmas, not in single units of anything.
Eurozone convention	The symbol goes after the figure with a comma for the decimal — 2,40 € — where Britain and America put it before with a full stop.
Unit pricing	Comes into British, EU and North American practice through the early 1970s. A price-per-kilo line under the price is the visual signature of a modern shelf edge.

And the amount. Sign Shop scales every figure through a retail price index, so the money on the ticket is money of its own year: a tin of peaches is 8½d in 1930 and £2.40 in 2026. The index is approximate on purpose — it is there so the ticket reads right on camera, not so anyone can settle an argument about 1947.

⑪ How the name got onto the shopfront

The letterform dates a fascia, but the finish is most of what the camera sees, and it has its own dates.

Finish	Years, and what it looks like
Gilded and shaded	Gold leaf on the inside of the glass or on a painted board, with a hard drop shadow to lift it. The Victorian and Edwardian default; the trade never entirely died, and hand lettering came back after 2012.
Vitreous enamel	c.1880–1950. Powdered glass fused onto rolled iron, one firing per colour, the design laid in by stencil. Killed off around the war by cost and by the demand for metal. Chips to bare iron from the fixing holes outward.
Painted timber	Any year. A flat ground, a keyline, a signwriter.
Neon	Georges Claude shows it at the Paris Motor Show in December 1910; the first sold signs are 1923. Pure neon glows red-orange and nothing else — every other colour needs the phosphor-coated tubing Jacques Risler patented in 1926. Nearly 2,000 neon shops in America by 1940.
Internally lit box	An acrylic face in an aluminium tray. The post-war shopfront.
Cut vinyl on panel	Plotter-cut film from the 1980s — and the reason hand lettering nearly disappeared for twenty years.

⑫ The station sign has three lives

Era	The object
to the mid 1960s	Vitreous enamel on a dark ground, capitals, a white keyline held in from the edge, bolt holes at the corners. The long version is the running-in board, placed so it is read as the train runs in, with the neighbouring stations smaller either side. British station names were removed or obscured 1939–45 to deny the location to an invader.
1965 onward	The corporate-identity panel: one grotesque, one size, initial cap and lowercase, the operator’s device at the left, slide-in strips in an aluminium extrusion. British Rail’s Rail Alphabet of 1965, by Kinneir and Calvert, was also adopted by the NHS, the airports authority and the National Coal Board — which is why a hospital corridor of that era is, typographically, a railway.
from the mid 1990s	Privatisation: one railway becomes a hundred and twenty-five companies, and every one of them picks its own colour and its own typeface.

Bus stop flags. No pictogram before the fifties — an enamel plate with the words in capitals. Route numbers move into boxes after the war, because that is how a passenger reads four of them at forty yards. British deregulation on 26 October 1986 puts several operators’ strips on one pole with nobody responsible for the whole thing. A stop code printed small at the foot, for texting, is a 2000s object.

Line diagrams. Harry Beck’s 1931 diagram, issued to the public in 1933, drew interchanges as diamonds and ordinary stops as ticks. Hutchison made interchanges black circles in 1960; Garbutt restored the curves and settled on the open circle in 1964, which is what nearly everyone has used since.

⑬ What marks a station, country by country

Almost every device a passenger actually sees is a registered trade mark, so none of them is drawn. What a prop needs is not the mark but the convention: which letter a country puts on a metro entrance, what shape it sits in, from what year — and, for the countries whose stops carry words and no device at all, the words.

Country	What the passenger sees, and from when
United Kingdom	Nothing that can be drawn. A British station is identified by its nameboard, which is the thing to reproduce. The roundel and the double arrow are both out, at any colour.
Deutschland	The stop sign is the dateable object, and it is a traffic sign rather than a company’s mark, so it can be drawn as itself. Before 28 July 1939 there was no national standard at all — a plain board reading Haltestelle der Straßenbahn or Kraftwagenhaltestelle. The Reichsverkehrsminister’s standard of that date gives the tram a round yellow disc with a green rim and a green H, 35 or 45 cm across, and the bus a flag-shaped sign with a round head. From 1953 to 1970 the stop was governed by BOStrab and BOKraft, not the StVO. Stop signs entered the StVO catalogue for the first time with the StVO 1970, in force 1 March 1971: Zeichen 224, a green H in a green circle on a yellow square. The 6. Verordnung of 21 July 1983 merged the separate tram and bus signs into one. So: round before March 1971, square after it. The S-Bahn mark is Fritz Rosen’s, introduced 1 December 1930 for 800 Reichsmark and originally a rectangular shape carrying the word Bahn; the white S in a green circle arrived with the Nord-Süd-S-Bahn on 28 July 1936. It is DB’s registered mark and is not drawn.
France	First line 19 July 1900, during the Exposition Universelle. Guimard’s entrances, 1900–1913, carry the word MÉTROPOLITAIN and an orange globe; later stone and metal balustrades carry MÉTRO under a spherical lamp; the bare M is the ordinary marking since the war, which is as tight as the record gets.
Italia	Rome’s Linea B, 9 February 1955; Milan’s Linea 1, 1 November 1964, signed by Bob Noorda with Franco Albini — Compasso d’Oro 1964. Milan’s entrance mark is a white M on a red square. A metropolitana in an Italian scene set before 1955 is wrong.
España	Madrid inaugurated by Alfonso XIII on 17 October 1919; Barcelona’s Gran Metro 30 December 1924. The Spanish convention is a lozenge rather than a circle — Madrid’s rombo is described as a diamond substituted for the London circle, keeping red, white and blue, with lettering across it. That is the operator’s device: the studio draws a plain lozenge in its own colour and puts no lettering across it.
United States	Boston’s T in a circle, from the rebranding by Cambridge Seven Associates. The year is not a guess at the mark: the MBTA itself was created on 3 August 1964, taking over from the MTA, so 1964 is the earliest the T could exist rather than the date it was adopted, which no source gives. The line colours are firm — assigned 26 August 1965. Washington opened 27 March 1976 with a graphics standard by Massimo Vignelli at Unimark International, the M pylon among it — and the standard is six years older than the railway: the WMATA Manual of Graphic Standards is dated 1970. A station sign starts at the opening because that is when there was a station; a hoarding or a construction sign of the early seventies could carry the pylon.
Ελλάδα	This is the one most often got wrong, because a British roundel is the first thing that comes to hand and Greece has never had one. Ο ηλεκτρικός wears no device: it wears a name board. The Athens–Piraeus line was electrified in 1904; the Hellenic Electric Railways (ΗΣΑΠ) ran it from 1 January 1976 until 17 June 2011, when it was absorbed into ΣΤΑΣΥ and the line became Line 1 of the Metro. Το μετρό — Lines 2 and 3 opened 28 January 2000. A metro Μ in a scene set before 2000 is an anachronism; before it there is only the electric railway and its name board. Το τραμ — the modern Athens network opened 19 July 2004, weeks before the Olympics. Τραμ Α.Ε. was founded March 2001 and absorbed into ΣΤΑΣΥ in 2011. Τα ΚΤΕΛ — Κοινά Ταμεία Εισπράξεων Λεωφορείων, created by Law 2119/1952, one to a prefecture; reorganised by Legislative Decree 102/1973; turned into ανώνυμες εταιρείες by Law 2963/2001, which is why an Α.Ε. on the end of the company line dates the sign after 2001. No common national emblem was found in any source: each ΚΤΕΛ writes its name in letters. The correct signage is lexical — ΣΤΑΘΜΟΣ ΥΠΕΡΑΣΤΙΚΩΝ ΛΕΩΦΟΡΕΙΩΝ, ΠΡΑΚΤΟΡΕΙΟ, ΑΦΕΤΗΡΙΑ, ΣΤΑΣΗ, and the company as ΥΠΕΡΑΣΤΙΚΟ ΚΤΕΛ Ν. […] Α.Ε. Ο ΟΑΣΑ was founded 22 December 1993; ΟΣΥ and ΣΤΑΣΥ were formed in March 2011. The stop reads ΣΤΑΣΙΣ in katharevousa and ΣΤΑΣΗ after the 1982 reform — and Greek capitals carry no tonos, which is the fastest way to spot a sign set by someone who does not read Greek.

⑭ The pictogram dates the board

A public pictogram vocabulary is a 1970s invention. Before it, a station board spells the words out.

Date	What is on the board
to about 1968	Words, not pictures. WAY OUT, LADIES, GENTLEMEN, LEFT LUGGAGE, REFRESHMENTS, ENQUIRIES, spelled out in capitals, with a drawn arrow — triangular head, tapered shaft, frequently inconsistent from board to board. Enamel, painted wood, or cast letters on a painted ground.
1972	Otl Aicher’s Munich Olympic set, built on a grid and drawing on Masaru Katsumie’s Tokyo 1964 iconography.
November 1974	34 AIGA/DOT symbols, designed by Roger Cook and Don Shanosky for the US Department of Transportation. Black on a white symbol field in a square with rounded corners. A US government work, and therefore public domain.
1979	16 more, total 50: cashier, coat check, escalator, stairs, nursery, drinking fountain, waiting room, barber, flight information, no dogs, exit, fire extinguisher, litter.
October 1980	ISO 7001 first published. Now 177 symbols in seven categories, and it specifies no colours at all — only contrast. Prohibition in ISO 7001 uses a red slash, not the ISO 3864 roundel, which is a real visual difference between a wayfinding sign and a safety sign.

The international access symbol is Susanne Koefoed’s, 1968. A board cannot offer step-free access with a wheelchair symbol before anyone had drawn one.

⑮ Two more things that date themselves

Object	What the year does to it
The radiation trefoil	Doodled at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in 1946 and issued magenta on blue — the magenta (Martin Senour Roman Violet No. 2225) was chosen because it was expensive and would appear on nothing else in the building. ISO R.361 of 1963 and ANSI of 1969 put it black on yellow. The geometry is fixed: a central disc of radius r, three blades from 1.5r to 5r, 60° of blade and 60° of gap. 2007: ISO 21482 adds the red supplementary symbol for sealed sources — trefoil, skull and running figure.
Fire extinguishers	A British body was coloured all over to say what was in it — signal red water, cream foam, French blue dry powder, black carbon dioxide, emerald green halon — until BS EN 3 in 1997 made every body red with a colour patch of 5–10% of the surface. A solid cream cylinder in shot is pre-1997 Britain and nothing else. Halon was phased out afterwards, so a green body is doubly period. America has no colour standard at all and relies on pictograms.

⑯ Four more countries, and what gives each away

One tell per country is usually enough. These are the ones that cost nothing to get right and are unmistakable when they are wrong.

The tell	Germany · France · Italy · Spain
The octagon	Germany: HALT from 1 Nov 1938 to the Vienna StVO of 1971, then STOP — and before 1938 there is no stop sign at all: the 1934–38 catalogue has only Vorfahrtrecht auf der Hauptstraße achten!, and the only “Halt” in the book is the plate at a level crossing or a customs post, so a 1936 German octagon is an anachronism.  France: STOP — France uses the English word, on sign AB4.  Italy: STOP.  Spain: STOP (R‑2), and never PARE, which is Latin American.
The give-way triangle	Germany: bare — Bild 30 Vorfahrt achten!, then Zeichen 205.  France: bare; the words CÉDEZ LE PASSAGE go on the advance panel AB3a and not in the triangle.  Italy: worded in the period forms — DARE LA PRECEDENZA inside the shape.  Spain: worded — CEDA EL PASO printed inside the triangle, which nobody else in Europe does and which identifies a Spanish junction on its own.
Route prefix	Germany: A Autobahn, B federal — numbered unbroken from the Reichsstraßen of 1934 and simply relettered R → B on 24 May 1949 — and L for Land roads; the DDR used F, redesignated B on 3 Oct 1990.  France: A, N, D; a road that is a D today can legitimately carry an N cartouche in a 1975 scene and cannot in a 2010 one.  Italy: A and SS — and every SS has a name as well as a number, so “SS 12” is half a legend; most became SR or SP from 2001, so a post‑2001 sign can carry almost any regional prefix and a pre‑2001 one must say SS.  Spain: A and AP, and the six radial roads from Madrid in Roman numerals, N‑I to N‑VI, which nothing else in Europe does.
One-way	Germany: EINBAHNSTRASSE on the older white plate — and ß becomes SS in all caps, which is the one German letter a dresser gets asked about.  France: SENS UNIQUE on a rectangular plate, everywhere, alongside the blue arrow C12.  Italy: SENSO UNICO on the older signs; the wording was dropped in the newer designs, which makes it a clean era marker.  Spain: DIRECCIÓN ÚNICA or SENTIDO ÚNICO.
Roadworks extent plate	auf 800 m · sur 800 m · per 800 m · PRÓXIMOS 800 m — and the distance is in metres, rounded to the fifty. No authority has ever signed 774 of anything.
Street plate	Germany: blue with white lettering, mixed case — never capitals, which would also destroy the ß.  France: the blue enamel plate with a white bevel and white lettering.  Italy: blue and white, or older marble and black.  Spain: often a glazed tile, blue on white.

⑰ The money is not just the symbol

A price ticket with the right currency name and the wrong order of magnitude is worse than one with no currency at all, because it looks researched.

Unit	The break, and what it does to the figure
Reichsmark → DM	20 June 1948. A pre-war German ticket reads RM. The currency reform cut cash and savings ten to one, but prices and wages went over at 1:1, so the figure on a 1947 ticket and a 1949 ticket is about the same and only the name changes. A 1936 ticket that says DM is the same class of error as a pre-decimal British one that says £1.20.
Ancien franc → NF	1 January 1960, and the new franc is worth a hundred old ones. A 1955 tin of peaches is 130 F, not 1,30 F — three figures where you expect two. For the first few years the tickets wrote NF to say which franc they meant, which makes NF an object good for about 1960 to 1962 and no longer.
Drachma	1 May 1954: a thousand old drachmas to one new. A pre-1954 Greek price runs in thousands.
Lira and peseta	No revaluation, which is itself the tell: a lira price runs in thousands and a peseta price in hundreds right up to 2001, so an Italian or Spanish shelf ticket of 1995 looks nothing like a euro one — while a Deutsche Mark ticket is about twice a euro and reads almost the same. That is why the euro changeover is invisible on a German shelf and obvious on an Italian one.
The euro	Cash from 1 January 2002. Dual pricing either side of it. The continental decimal is a comma and the thousands separator a full stop — the other way round from Britain and America, and a bottle is 2,5 l and not 2.5 l.

⑱ The notice on the wall, and the regime behind it

The statutory poster is the most national object in any interior, because it exists for one reason: a statute says it must be on the wall. It is also the cheapest way to place a set.

	The poster, and the safety-sign regime behind it
Germany	Aushangpflichtige Gesetze — the laws that must be displayed. The Arbeitszeitordnung of 1938 heads the list until the Arbeitszeitgesetz of 6 June 1994 replaces it; the Arbeitsschutzgesetz follows in 1996. Regime: Unfallverhütungsvorschriften → DIN 4844 → ASR A1.3 of 2007 → its 2013 restatement, which is the one that adopts ISO 7010. LEBENSGEFAHR and ACHTUNG are the pre-war words, not GEFAHR.
France	Affichage obligatoire under the Code du travail: collective hours, the applicable convention collective, the inspection du travail, the service de santé au travail. Before it, the règlement intérieur under the loi du 12 juin 1893. Regime: 1893 → arrêté du 4 novembre 1993 implementing 92/58/EEC → NF EN ISO 7010. DANGER DE MORT is the old enamel plate.
Italy	An estratto delle norme antinfortunistiche under D.P.R. 27 aprile 1955, n. 547, then the notice under D.Lgs. 626/1994, then D.Lgs. 9 aprile 2008, n. 81. Regime: D.P.R. 547/1955 → D.Lgs. 493/1996 → D.Lgs. 81/2008 with ISO 7010. PERICOLO DI MORTE is the old plate.
Spain	The Ordenanza General de Seguridad e Higiene en el Trabajo, the order of 9 March 1971, then the notice under the Ley 31/1995 — with the calendario laboral that art. 34.6 of the Estatuto de los Trabajadores requires to be posted. Regime: Ordenanza General 1971 → RD 485/1997 → UNE EN ISO 7010. PELIGRO DE MUERTE is the old plate.

And on a chemical label the sentences are not descriptions: the R and S phrases of Directive 67/548/EEC and the H and P statements of Regulation 1272/2008 are legally prescribed, with an official text in every language of the Union. R11 is Leichtentzündlich in German and Facilement inflammable in French and nothing else; the code is the same in every language, which is the whole point of having a code. Several P-statements were reworded by the twelfth ATP, Regulation (EU) 2019/521, in force 17 October 2020 — so a label of 2015 and a label of 2025 do not read identically even in the same language.

⑲ The alphabet, which is read before anything else

Shape, colour and legend can all be right and the sign still be wrong, because the letterforms are the first thing an audience reads and the last thing anyone can fix afterwards. Almost every country letters its signs in an alphabet drawn for the purpose, and half of Europe is lettered in the same one.

	The alphabet, and what dates it
Britain	Transport, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, 1963, in exactly two weights and no more: Medium for light text on a dark ground and Heavy for dark text on a light one. That is not a stylistic choice — it is what the two cuts are for, and a legend set in the wrong one reads as a reproduction. Motorway route numbers are set in a different alphabet again, Motorway, in a Permanent cut for white on blue and a heavier Temporary cut for black on yellow roadworks signing. Before Worboys the signs are lettered in a condensed grotesque, in capitals.
America	The FHWA Standard Alphabets for Highway Signs — Highway Gothic in the trade. Drafted by the Public Roads Administration during the war and trialled on the Pentagon approaches in 1942, published 1948, reprinted 1952, revised 1966, 1977 and 2000. Series A was dropped for poor legibility at speed; B, C and D carry route numbers, street names and small legends, E and F the larger ones. Series E Modified, drawn 1949–50 for button-reflector signs, became the mixed-case face of every freeway guide sign through the 1958 AASHTO Interstate signing manual — so a green guide sign in capitals is pre-1958, and one in mixed case is not. The rule an American sign shop follows is to drop to a narrower series before reducing the letter height. And Clearview: interim approval 2004, rescinded 2016, reinstated by Congress in 2018 and optional ever since — a twelve-year window, and the only thing in American signing that dates itself that precisely.
Germany	DIN 1451, Mittelschrift and the condensed Engschrift. The standard is of 1931 and German signs have never been lettered in anything else, which is why German signage looks consistent across ninety years in a way no other country's does.
France	Caractères, in four cuts. L1 and L2 are capitals-only and upright — L1 black on white for local targets, L2 lighter and more widely spaced for distant ones, white on blue for autoroutes and green for routes nationales. L4 is italic with lowercase, for facilities, and L5 is Frutiger-derived for the lowest-priority signing. So an italic lowercase legend on a French sign is telling you it is not a destination.
Italy	Alfabeto Normale, which is a bolder variant of Transport, and Alfabeto Stretto, which is Normale condensed.
Spain	Carretera Convencional, derived from Transport, with Autopista on the motorways.
Greece	Two alphabets in one country: Transport on everything that is not a motorway — there is a Greek cut of Transport Medium — and DIN 1451 on the motorways. A Greek motorway gantry and a Greek village fingerpost in the same shot are lettered differently, and nobody else does that.

And the narrow cut is not a nicety. DIN 1451 has Mittelschrift and Engschrift; Italy's Alfabeto has Normale and Stretto. Engschrift exists for one job — a long place name on a standard blank — so a German or Italian legend that will not fit is set narrower, not smaller, and a German sign with a nine-syllable town on it in shrunken Mittelschrift is wrong twice over. It is the same rule an American sign shop follows when it drops from Series E Modified to E to D before it touches the letter height. Britain, Spain and Greece have no condensed cut of Transport and do reduce the height, which is why their long legends look different. Spain’s Carretera Convencional has no variants at all — Autopista, the motorway face, was abolished in 2015 and left it doing everything — and there is only a Medium cut of Transport Greek.

And the exception, which is Greek. Greece letters its motorways in DIN 1451, and DIN is the one European alphabet whose whole point is that it has Engschrift. So a Greek motorway gantry narrows before it shrinks exactly as a German one does, while a Greek village fingerpost a mile away, set in Transport, has nothing to narrow to and goes on reducing its letter height. One country, two alphabets, two different answers to a long name — and both of them correct.

The two French cuts are the same drawing. Caractères L1 and L2 are one design: L2 is L1 lighter and more widely spaced, and the ground decides which — L1 black on white for a local target, L2 white on the blue of an autoroute or the green of a route nationale for a distant one. So the spacing on a French direction sign tells you whether the place is near or far, which nothing else in Europe does. L4, the italic cut with lowercase, is for facilities rather than destinations; an italic lowercase legend on a French sign is telling you it is not a place.

Which means four of the seven want the same alphabet. Transport letters Britain, Italy (bolder), Spain (derived) and Greece (non-motorway), and DIN letters Germany, the French capitals and the Greek motorways. Get those two and you have lettered most of Europe.

What this studio uses, and the real Transport is in it. The American alphabets are the standard’s own: all six FHWA series are US federal work and are drawn here from published outlines, which is also why an American legend is fitted by dropping to a narrower series rather than by shrinking the type. Transport, Motorway and the pre-Worboys alphabet are the genuine Crown Copyright files, licensed under the Open Government Licence v1.0 — so Britain, Italy (the bolder Alfabeto Normale), Spain (the derived Carretera Convencional) and Greece are all lettered in real Transport, and a British motorway route number is set in real Motorway. Three things are worth knowing about them. There is only a Medium cut of Transport Greek, so a Greek legend that wants Heavy gets Medium — the right alphabet slightly too light, which is much the better error. Old Road Sign has no lowercase at all, and that is the alphabet rather than the digitisation: the pre-Worboys Ministry letters were capitals only, and lower case on a British road sign is Kinneir’s. It carries twenty-six blank glyphs where the lowercase would be, which a browser will cheerfully draw as empty space, so they are dropped from the subset and nothing stands in for them — a pre-Worboys legend is set in capitals, distances and roadworks plate included. And DIN is still stood in for by Gidole, a single-cut open face that is DIN in skeleton and proportion but not a revival — Germany, the French capitals and the Greek motorways.

Anderson, not Worboys — the seven years when Britain had two systems at once. The Anderson committee reported in 1957 and the first motorway signs went up with the Preston By-pass in 1958: white on blue, Kinneir and Calvert’s Transport and Motorway, and mixed case — seven years before Worboys put the same lettering on every other road. So between 1958 and 1964 a British motorway sign and a British A-road sign a mile apart are in different alphabets and different cases, and both are right. It is the single most useful thing to know about dressing a British road scene in that decade, and the studio draws it: pick a motorway before 1965 and the legend changes with the colour.

What this studio uses: the American alphabets are the real thing — all six series are US federal work and are drawn here from the standard's own outlines, which is also why an American legend is fitted by dropping a series rather than by shrinking the type. Fira Sans stays behind Transport in the stack, clamped to the same two weights, for anything the Crown files do not carry — an accent outside Latin-1, or a Greek Heavy.

⑳ Portugal, the Netherlands, Turkey and Russia

Four markets added in September 2026. Two limits hold in every studio: Turkey starts in 1928, the year the Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic script (an earlier Turkish sheet would be Ottoman, which no studio sets), and Russian before 1918 is spelled by rule — the hard sign on every word ending in a consonant and і before a vowel are placed automatically; the yat (ѣ) cannot be derived from modern spelling and is left as е. Turkish capitals keep their dots: i goes to İ and ı to I, so İSTANBUL, never ISTANBUL.

Country	What the studio changes, and when
Portugal	Regimes of 1930, 1954 and 1998; street plates and directions in Portuguese; prices in réis, cifrão escudos, euros.
Netherlands	The ANWB signs, the 1966 and 1990 regimes; the blue of Dutch directional signs; guilders to 2001.
Turkey	From 1928; the 1953 and 1983 regimes (the triangle for YOL VER before 1984); Turkish capitals.
Russia	Five regimes: the Empire (versts, old orthography), 1933, 1965, 1979 and 2004; СТОП in Cyrillic; street plates, the district and the route number; kilometres after the metric decree.

㉑ What we could not verify

This page is built from the public record. Where the record is thin, saying so is more useful than filling the gap.

• The German white U on blue still could not be dated, after a second research pass. Berlin settled on the abbreviation U-Bahn around 1929 and Hamburg in 1936, and the U prefix on line numbers is 1984, when the BVG took over the S-Bahn — but no source consulted dates the sign itself or names its designer, including the German Wikipedia history of the Berliner U-Bahn, which runs from 1902 to 2019 and does not mention it. The studio offers it from 1929, which is the abbreviation’s year and not the sign’s. The comparison that makes the gap plain is the S-Bahn mark beside it, which is documented to the day: 1 December 1930, Fritz Rosen, 800 Reichsmark. It is an open question in the Archive.
• The Paris circled M is dated only as since the war by the source. The studio breaks at 1946, which is a reading of that phrase and not a documented year.
• Rome’s metro entrance device could not be verified. The Italian article describes only the line letters in the line colours; the white M on red is attested for Milan and drawn from there.
• Madrid’s public opening date is contested — 19 October by one encyclopaedia, 31 October by the other; the royal inauguration of 17 October 1919 is solid. The designer of the rombo is contested too, two sources for Antonio Palacios and one for Antonio González Echarte.
• The MBTA T is dated 1964 by a single secondary branding source. Washington’s brown M is Vignelli/Unimark by sourced attribution, but the mark’s own adoption date could not be separated from the 1976 opening.
• ΚΤΕΛ: no common national device was found in any source, and each prefectural company brands itself with its own wordmark. That is an absence of evidence rather than a sourced statement that none exists — but it is why the studio letters a ΚΤΕΛ sign instead of drawing one an emblem.
• The brown-to-blue shift in British hospital wayfinding is widely repeated and is drawn here, but the NHS identity programme of the 1990s is not documented in the general reference sources — treat the date range as approximate.
• The year British brown tourist signs were prescribed is not firmly attested anywhere we could check. The studio ties them to TSRGD 1994 and the Guildford Rules, which is defensible.
• The claim that street nameplates are not traffic signs in law is commonly made and is the reason every borough has its own; the general reference sources classify them the other way. Either way the practical point holds — they were never standardised the way traffic signs were.
• NFPA 704’s white-quadrant codes are certain; the years each of OX, the barred W and SA individually entered the standard are not. The studio anchors only on 1960.
• Regional colour schemes on British station signage: only two of the six regions are attested. The rest are drawn from the design’s own palette rather than asserted.
• The year the Italian and Spanish worded give-way triangle went bare is not firmly attested in anything we could check. Both countries letter the shape in their period forms and both are bare today; the studio breaks at 1992, which is defensible but approximate.
• The shop-hours times on the ÖFFNUNGSZEITEN, HEURES D’OUVERTURE, ORARIO and HORARIO cards are typical of the trade and the period. The German week is the Ladenschlussgesetz of 1956 and its dates are firm; the French, Italian and Spanish hours are dressing, not prescription.
• The supplementary texts under ISO 7010 signs are left to the supplier by the standard itself, so the German, French, Italian and Spanish legends here are faithful trade wordings and not quotations.
• The official P-statements contain ellipses the labeller is meant to fill in — P280 is Schutzhandschuhe/…/Augenschutz … tragen. They are filled in here rather than printed as blanks, because a label prop with a gap in it reads as a placeholder. The R and S phrases are quoted from national transpositions rather than from EUR-Lex itself, which would not serve the text in a form we could read.
• The items listed under each statutory poster are a fair summary of what that notice covers. The headings, the statutes and the dates are real; the lines are not the statute’s own words.
• Gidole is not DIN 1451, and it is what Germany, the French capitals and the Greek motorways are set in here. It carries the right skeleton, weight and proportion rather than the right outlines. France is the one to watch: Gidole is DIN-shaped and Caractères is not DIN, so a French sign read close up on camera is the furthest from its real alphabet of anything in this studio. The Checks panel says so on every sign, and names the alphabet it is standing in for.
• Clearview is not drawn and will not be. It is a proprietary face, and drawing it would be copying somebody’s type rather than following a published standard. The record is here instead: a Clearview guide sign dates a scene to 2004–2016 or after 2018, and never to 2016 or 2017, which is the most precisely dating object in American signing. The studio sets American legends in the FHWA series, which is also what most of the country never stopped using.