Going places with typography

Everyone who knows me at all knows I’m a fan of a good typeface (and a nice bottle of wine, and a pretty pair of shoes). Less common know­ledge is my fond­ness for public transit.

Sure, it’s often dirty, loud, crowded, and out­moded. Often­times it’s a good way to run into people you’d rather avoid. But it’s an excel­lent measure of the vitality of a city—its public transit system is the lifeblood of its “common” people, and a reflec­tion of how it treats them. Of course, the city in which I live has one of the most miser­able public transit sys­tems I’ve come across. I sold my little Honda Civic just before I left for five weeks in eastern Europe last summer, and I’ve been strug­gling to get by without it ever since. (Winter’s going to be fun.)

A year ago I found cheap air­fare to Mexico, and have since been taking off on a reg­ular basis, trav­eling about and becoming a bit of a digital nomad (which is another story entirely). I’ve been lucky to do a decent bit of trav­eling since then, and I’ve taken buses, trains, sub­ways, fer­ries, and trams in various cities across nine dif­ferent coun­tries, most of which spoke lan­guages unin­tel­li­gible to me. Given the lan­guage bar­rier, the fact that I was almost always solo, and the fact that I can get lost in a three-foot-square glass bubble, I started paying a lot of atten­tion to way­faring signage.

Malostranská sta­tion in Praha

I received an email this morning about Hel­vetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story, which looks like a gor­geous book. NYC’s subway system is def­in­itely known for its use of Hel­vetica, which makes it easy to spot a subway entrance on a crowded street (though I’ve very infre­quently found this to be of great dif­fi­culty, with the excep­tion of Rome, whose Metro symbol looked like a McDonald’s, which littered Italy in the same ubi­quitous way you find Tim Horton’s here). How­ever, when I was there, I was more inter­ested in the typefaces used to dis­play the sta­tion names set in mosaic tiles in the wall, which seemed to be more a relic of the system’s past than of any util­it­arian value.

I think it’s these dec­or­ative ele­ments, mixed with the more strictly “Oh, God, where am I?” use­ful­ness of the actual sig­nage, that interests me about transit sys­tems. In Boston, I saw an advert­ise­ment for Cor­aline that was installed in pieces to dis­play in the window as the train passed (thanks, You­Tube! How did we ever sur­vive without you?), making clever use of the rather frag­mented move­ment of the car. I didn’t take the metro much in Bud­apest, but when I went to the Turkish baths, I found a gor­geous yellow line sta­tion full of ornate columns and inter­esting tex­tures. (Unfor­tu­nately, my camera was out of film, but here’s an image of another well-restored sta­tion.) Prague had prob­ably my favourite system—the trains may have been crowded, but they were intensely simple for a tourist to get around in. Trains from the same line would arrive on either side of the plat­form, above which hung a great big colour-coded sign that indic­ated where you were, and which stops either train would ser­vice from there. Once you hopped on, there were maps of the subway line every­where, with little dia­grams of major monu­ments at the stops. The present stop and next stop would be announced via an aud­ible loud­speaker at each stop—not all that useful if Czech sounds like Wookie to you—and dis­played on a vis­ible LCD screen. It was nearly impossible to get lost, and pretty to boot.

Way­faring is one of those things where the import­ance of good design becomes very evident—do it well and everyone’s happy; do it badly and chaos ensues. What are some examples of good, bad, or beau­tiful sig­nage you’ve seen in public places?

Tags: design, life, travel, typography