Watch out for that diamond sign

diamond signDonald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University, maintains one of the homelier homepages on the web. But he has a refined eye for design. I’m fascinated by his photographic collection of diamond road signs. Knuth is known for attention to minutia. He invented TeX a system for typesetting and Metafont a format for creating and encoding typefaces on computers. Perhaps it’s his eye for typographical detail that drew his eye to the distinctiveness to be found in common road signs.