I found this interesting article on the Canadian Design Resource blog… Take also a look at the others post on general design.
I had always assumed that the Canadian Government used Helvetica for all of its brand outputs — but after spending far too many hours staring at a sign hanging from the ceiling of my local passport office, non-Helvetica flourishes began to appear (see ‘r’ comparison above with Helvetica Medium overlaid in red). At first I assumed that, like so many large institutions, various smaller agencies within the larger whole had gone off-brand by substituting Arial or Helvetica Neue for Helvetica proper (because whoever made the sign was using a PC, or didn’t know any better, or some combination of the two), but after a bit of design geekery (apparently government offices don’t like you taking hundreds of detail shots of their signage) and some googling, I came across Section 4.5 of the Federal Identity Program’s Usage Manual, aptly titled ’signage typeface’.
-John Ryan
