I was hoping for your help with something.
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@mwichary david kindersley’s lettering, designed for motorway road signs, but rejected, and instead relatively popular for street name signs (especially in his home town cambridge)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/36844288@N00/albums/72157621886573981/
https://wemadethis.co.uk/blog/2022/02/street-name-fonts/
https://thebeautyoftransport.com/2021/11/03/how-serifs-lost-the-road-war-but-won-the-streets/
@mwichary Kindersley also designed the monumental lettering for the gateway of the new British Library at St Pancras
his wife Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley still runs a stonecutting workshop in Cambridge and they have a distinctive italic style that’s common in stone plaques around here https://www.kindersleyworkshop.co.uk
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@mwichary This is East Berlin 1984. They still had some Fraktur signage.
🧐@kallekn Wow, this feels much older than 1984.
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@mwichary I know. It’s horrible. The font is pretty nice.
@grmon This is, weirdly, the only form of Gill Sans I can tolerate. Otherwise why not just go for Futura.
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I was hoping for your help with something.
Is there a particular font that’s instantly recognizable to someone who lives where you do, and appreciated/recognized/hated there, but completely unknown elsewhere? Something on road signs, street names, transit, infrastructure, stuff like that? I’ll share some examples in the thread.
I’d love to learn more about these. I’m not afraid of links in languages I don’t understand, ha.
(Also please repost for reach if you are willing!)
Thank you!
@mwichary the numbers on trams in Wrocław, especially the "2"
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6.
Also in San Francisco, there are these classic distinctive house numbers.The story is here if you are curious: https://sunnysidehistory.org/2020/07/15/the-little-sculpture-affixed-your-house-anton-fazekas/
@mwichary What is the history of these? I see them *all the time* in SF. There has to be some backstory given their ubiquity.
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@grmon Oh shit, I wasn’t aware of the extent of all this.
@mwichary @grmon It was very difficult to locate, but I bought a copy of MacCarthy’s biography about 20 years ago. It’s probably the seminal work on Gill.
It’s becoming more common to see the rejection of his type due to his notoriety. I believe there are some wanting his sculptures at 55 Broadway removed as well.
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@grmon This is, weirdly, the only form of Gill Sans I can tolerate. Otherwise why not just go for Futura.
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@chunshek Oh, thank you! I wish I could read this. I might be coming back to Taiwan later this year!
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@mwichary What is the history of these? I see them *all the time* in SF. There has to be some backstory given their ubiquity.
@pcherry I think you missed a link I included.
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@scruss @mwichary @secretasianman There are “unofficial” versions floating around.
@michaelgemar @scruss @mwichary while the official ones roll and sit around
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@mwichary I know. It’s horrible. The font is pretty nice.
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1.
In Rotterdam, I spotted this quirky house number font with a very distinctive 3 and 5. I also saw it on some (historical?) license plates.@mwichary
About Dutch license plates:
https://kentekenkennis.nl/home -
I was hoping for your help with something.
Is there a particular font that’s instantly recognizable to someone who lives where you do, and appreciated/recognized/hated there, but completely unknown elsewhere? Something on road signs, street names, transit, infrastructure, stuff like that? I’ll share some examples in the thread.
I’d love to learn more about these. I’m not afraid of links in languages I don’t understand, ha.
(Also please repost for reach if you are willing!)
Thank you!
Transport (as a typeface) is familiar to anyone who drives in the UK. It works brilliantly for road-signs, for which it was specifically designed.
Whichever font you use, for legibility purposes, do not use all caps. It astonishes me that road signs in many countries break this basic rule
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@mwichary I've lived a couple years in the Basque country, where there is a local font style (not a single font though)
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@mwichary DB Neo, corporate typeface of deutsche bahn is quite recognizable for people in Germany. It's not used on station signage or wayfinding, but it is used in advertisements, the app and website and passenger information system on some trains
@mwichary especially the lowercase i of the head font is somewhat distinctive
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@mwichary I've seen it pop up in one or two non-Chicago things, but I'd say the Big Shoulders font family qualifies. Locals probably mostly don't know the name, but it's on a lot of Chicago stuff (not just official city things, either, though sometimes on stuff that wants to seem like it) and not really anywhere else.
@aschmitz That’s interesting since I live here, but didn’t notice it? Do you have a go to example or two?
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@kallekn Wow, this feels much older than 1984.
@mwichary I remember wondering if the sign had been there since before the war, but that hardly seems possible.
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@mwichary especially the lowercase i of the head font is somewhat distinctive
@floy Thsnks!!!
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@mariejulien Thanks! Do you know if people love it/hate it/are indifferent/etc.?
@mwichary I don't know, i suppose that's just "yet another font" for people. We have also the Roissy font by Frutiger (for… well the Roissy Charles de Gaulle Paris airport
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I was hoping for your help with something.
Is there a particular font that’s instantly recognizable to someone who lives where you do, and appreciated/recognized/hated there, but completely unknown elsewhere? Something on road signs, street names, transit, infrastructure, stuff like that? I’ll share some examples in the thread.
I’d love to learn more about these. I’m not afraid of links in languages I don’t understand, ha.
(Also please repost for reach if you are willing!)
Thank you!
@mwichary There aren’t as many typefaces for Japanese as there are for the Latin alphabet, for obvious reasons, but there is of course a strong tradition of hand-lettering. There’s one particular lettering style called futomoji (literally “fat letters”) that traditionally is only used on sumo posters. Here’s an example of a sumo rankings table: https://www.kosho.or.jp/upload/save_image/26020250/20210924170531519305_30fd1f9fe4a0b34c207b0216c368c01e.jpg
