Site-specific installation by Tomo Tomo, commissioned by the Olympic Museum in Lausanne and YesMilano in the Metro 5 station of Portello, Milan.

Fundamentals was developed for the Olympic Winter Games 2026 in Milan and Cortina. The installation highlights the four disciplines hosted in Milan – ice hockey, figure skating, speed skating, and short track speed skating – bringing sport and art together.

Through a series of large-scale illustrations, the installation reveals key movements, rules, historical facts, figures and the stories of champions. Drawing on images selected from the Olympic Museum’s collections and reinterpreted in a graphic style inspired by Futurismo, the metro station becomes a place of discovery woven into everyday life.

The installation blends together moving images, infographics, and visually striking typography. Fully composed in Söhne Fett and Söhne Mono Kräftig by Klim Type Foundry.

A project curated by Zero.

This geometric sans-serif typeface was designed for the original section of the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) Yonge subway line. The typeface and TTC logo were developed during the construction of Line 1 Yonge–University in the 1940s, perhaps by draughtsman Philip Butt, but the original designer has never been determined. The font is composed of capital letters sandblasted into the tiles of Toronto subway stations opened between 1954 and 1974, as well as on signs.

The sui generis Toronto Subway font was designed in 2004 by David Vereschagin, who visited stations, took photos, and made rubbings of the letters on the original Vitrolite glass tiles. Vereschagin also designed a matching lowercase, inspired by Futura and similar designs.

By 2007, “TTC wayfinding typography” was a case study in what not to do, confusing users and neglecting local typographic heritage by incorporating a jumble of Univers, Swiss 721 and Gill Sans, as documented by Joe Clark in a presentation to the 2007 ATypI conference.

In 2013, the TTC created a design and wayfinding team who readopted the typeface, calling it Bloor-Yonge after the busy station at the intersection of two lines, and they began to re-apply it through the system. Lines recently built by the new regional transit authority, Metrolinx, only use the iconic typeface in some signage as a “decorative element.” Most wayfinding signage is in the new Metrolinx standard of ClearviewADA.

The Union station signage shown is from the 2014 renovation and expansion. The Eglinton station signage is original to 1954 and is a lighter weight used this way only in one other station. The exit sign is also a first use from 1954. The St Andrew station and “PLEASE HOLD HANDRAIL” sign are from the first line extension in 1963.

See also the Toronto Transit Commission Signage and Wayfinding Standards (2023).

A safety campaign for Transport for London, designed to spotlight potential hazards across the network. Led by Ali Augur at VCCP London, the design and art direction made the most of short, punchy headlines within a portrait format. To emphasise impact, Obviously was used for its variable weights. The font is robust even when skewed or angled, always holding its strength and clarity.

Illustrator Andrew Hudson was brought on board to create the textured and colourful visuals that run throughout the campaign, adding depth and personality to the message.

The Pankstraße subway station in Berlin was built in 1977 by the then responsible Baudirektor Rainer Gerhard Rümmler as part of the construction of the U8 subway line. The station’s name is mounted directly on the wall in individual aluminum letters using the typeface Octopuss, designed by Colin Brignall in 1970. The name is spelled with a double s instead of the eszett (ß), ignoring the correct German spelling.

As of March 2025, the station is under refurbishment. The images below show its status in 2002 and, by Ingolf, in 2012.

From Wikipedia:

Poodle Hat is the eleventh studio album by the American parody musician “Weird Al” Yankovic, released on May 20, 2003. It was the fifth studio album self-produced by Yankovic. The musical styles on the album are built around parodies and pastiches of pop of the early-2000s.

Cheltenham Bold Extra Condensed is used for the artist’s name. The album title is set in circled caps from the Demi weight of ITC Franklin Gothic, in reference to the New York City subway system. Art direction by Jackie Murphy and Nick Gamma, with photography by Mark Seliger.

[More info on Discogs]

The track listing on the back cover likewise uses Cheltenham. The bold sans is Champion Gothic.

After several centuries of total russification of Ukraine by the Russian Empire, the reverse process – derussification – is finally taking place. Hundreds of thousands of names of cities, streets, metro stations, and brands are either returning their original Ukrainian names or getting new ones.

On 29 April 2024, the metro station Пушкинская (Pushkinskaya) in the city of Kharkiv was renamed to Ярослава Мудрого (Yaroslava Mudroho, in English: Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kiev in the XI century). In July 2024, Kharkiv Metropolitan employees installed eight sets of letters with the new name on the walls of the station.

For the inscription, the Kharkiv Metropolitan used Sealt, a font family developed by Michael Rafailyk in 2021. Sealt is inspired by the oldest saltworks in Eastern Europe, founded in 1250 in Drohobych, Ukraine. Sealt means salt in Old English, so most letters are rough and sharp like salt crystals and seem to be carved out of the rock.

Source: www.kyivtypefoundry.com Matvii Masliukov. License: All Rights Reserved.

Palats Sportu (Палац Спорту) is a station on Kyiv Metro’s “green line”, officially known as the Syretsko-Pecherska Line. It was designed by architect Mykola Alyoshkin and opened in 1989. The sign on the station wall comprises brass letters cast in Novohrad-Volynsky stating the name in Cyrillic capitals: “ПАЛАЦ СПОРТУ”. There is an image depicting an old version “ДВОРЕЦ СПОРТА” in Russian that was dismantled in the course of derussification. The authorship of these curios letterforms remained unknown for a long time, then attributed to the architect Alyoshkin himself, until Kyiv Type Foundry’s team found out the original (thanks to Florian Hardwig) during their Kyiv Metro Fonts project.

Matvii Masliukov. License: All Rights Reserved.

Detail of the letters “ПОР”

It’s typefaces called New York 30 and was made by Dutch designer Leo Meuffels for Mecanorma, a French competitor to Letraset, in 1984. It is likely that the Mecanorma catalog got into Alyoshkin’s hands. Alyoshkin says: “I don't remember where I saw these letters, perhaps it was a catalogue that circulated at the Metroprojekt. I wasn't happy about their size at the wall. They should have been bigger. Bronze was very expensive in the USSR.”

Matvii Masliukov. License: All Rights Reserved.

Further uses of the font are lesser known. One case can be found in the second volume of Yasaburo Kuwayama’s book International Logotypes from 1990, where “MEGAVIDEO” appears in the “dotted” logotype genre showcase as no. 2428.

Source: drive.google.com License: All Rights Reserved.

The discovery of the Megavideo logo in the second volume of Yasaburo Kuwayama’s book International Logotypes from 1990 suggested that the letterforms in the metro stations are not custom, but come from a typeface.

Hand-drawn 1950s public transport map for Berlin with a cover set in Signal and Feder-Grotesk.

Opened by Sir Edwin Cornwall, M.P. Chairman of the London County Council, 10th March, 1906.

The opening of the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway, better known as the Bakerloo line, in 1906 was a milestone in the development of London’s Underground railways as it marked the inauguration of the first of the tube lines financed and constructed by the Underground Electric Railways of London group. The UERL was the vast, American backed, concern that had bought its way into London’s transport by effective purchase of the existing steam operated District Railway to electrify it, the construction of the power house at Lots Road, Chelsea, and the acquisition and construction of three tube railway schemes: the Baker St & Waterloo, the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway and the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway. The first stages of the three tube railways, under construction since 1902/3, were to open in 1906/7 – a great relief to the cash strapped company who had financed them as it meant that at last passenger fares started to provide income.

The very smart booklet produced for the opening is in simple deckle edged card covers (similar to that for the opening of the Met’s Uxbridge Extension) and this copy is signed “Cecil G Page” or Paget. The script typeface is a German design first cast by the foundry of Benjamin Krebs Nachfahren in Frankfurt/Main in 1903 as Ridingerschrift. The small text is set in two widths of De Vinne, which was domestically available from Caslon.

Read more about the history of the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway and see more images from the brochure on Flickr.

From It's For Us Instagram account:

Out of the blue, the DRM unlock the hatch of an emergency exit and take us into the vast subterrane of Berlin. An otherwise secluded world unfolds - dark and dusty concrete caves where time seems to stand still. Exclusive, atmospheric shots from the subway tunnels, all taken between 2016 and 2020, fill the void. Depicting recent memories is about hardships and friendships after years in the game. Berlin heavyweights Acid79, Micro, Shus, Area, Tok, Mad and Edward Nightingale unveil their diaries, almost perpetuating the sensation of a moist t-shirt on your face from a makeshift mask when the next traffic is passing by. Meticulously painted graffiti with attention to detail is reflected in the choice of materials, all devotedly designed by Deutsche und Japaner.
Opening a hatch has never been easier!

The book is designed with two members of the Suisse family, namely Suisse Works and Suisse Int’l, both featured top to bottom. Its special edition comes inside a bookcase made of stainless steel, echoing iron hatches closing subway entrances.

Suisse Works and Suisse Int’l is part of the Suisse family, available from Swiss Typefaces.

Subway advertising campaign for Tropicana orange juice in Philadelphia, Chicago and New York City.

The typography pairs the then recently released Quayside with Garage Gothic. Both typefaces have moved to new foundries since: Tobias Frere-Jones’ Garage Gothic was released by Font Bureau, and is now available from Frere-Jones’ outlet on Type Network; Quayside was released by the Schizotype foundry that was renamed to Dave Rowland Type in 2021.

In 1996 the Autonomous Parisian Transportation Administration (RATP) adopted the custom typeface Parisine. The development of the typeface family was part of the general effort – with Yo Kaminagai as a head of design – to unify the sign system of the Parisian metro, bus and regional express network which until then made use of different typefaces. An initial choice to rely on Neue Helvetica created disarray due to the font’s variations and difficulties to include longer station names (e.g. “Iéna Champs-Élysées – Clemenceau”, as opposed to “Iéna”).

Consequently, French type designer Jean François Porchez was commissioned to create a typeface that would be more “economical” in width. As described by Porchez in his Gazette, Parisine was:

designed from Helvetica Bold, condensed at 90%. Parisine is intentionally more open to counteract the reduction of the areas of the counters due to condensing. Its forms are softer and more round, horizontal parts are slightly heavier, optically, to compensate for the verticality accentuated by the slight narrowness of Parisine.

In August 2020 the Paris In collective raised awareness that the emblematic typography is threatened by the introduction of a different system used by Île-de-France Mobilités, the entity controlling the different transport companies of the Paris region. Their explicatory video warns of the beginning of what may be an increasing “contamination” of the standards.

[Editor’s note: Parisine was introduced in RATP’s communications in a decentralized way, and the family grew with needs and applications; see comments.]

Overview of the M4 metro line. Station names are set on an angle.

Diagram of the metro, RER, bus, and tramway lines.

Trilingual tourist map (2017) with info in French, English, and Spanish, designed by Be Dandy using Parisine’s narrow and compressed widths.

Strasbourg Saint-Denis station, July 2019.

July 16, 2018. One day after France won the Russia 2018 World Cup final football match, six metro stations were temporarily renamed. the Saint-Paul station was changed into Saint-Paul Pogba, and the Champs-Élysees station honoured the coach of the French football team, Didier Deschamps.

Sign post outside Pompadour station, 2019.

April 2020. Entry of the Plaisance Hôpital Saint-Joseph station, showing both Parisine and the famous art nouveau Paris metro signs.

RATP website, using Parisine and the same color scheme as used for the RATP signage.

Saint-Paul station fridge magnet, from the RATP merchandise shop.

Metro Bilbao is the subway system of Bilbao, the largest city in the Basque Country in northern Spain. It uses Rotis SemiSans for signage and communications.

The corporate design including the logo as well as the wayfinding system were designed by Otl Aicher and developed by his team members Michael Weiss and Hans Brucklacher.

In 1988, the contract for the underground metro system in Bilbao was awarded to the architects Sir Norman Foster and partners, following an open competition. The same year the first underground station was opened in Erandio, on the existing Bilbao-Plentzia railway. [Wikipedia] According to Bienal Internacional de Arquitectura MUGAK, this “exemplar mass transport information design project was realized thanks to [Aicher’s] special relationship with […] Foster”. Bilbao’s subway signage system was the last important design project of Aicher. Born in 1922, the German graphic designer and Ulm School of Design main co-founder died in 1991, and didn’t live to see the opening of the first part of line 1 in November 1995.

From the brand presentation:

The symbol of Metro Bilbao is an abstract figure based on tunnels and wheels in movement. It is formed by three rings of different thicknesses, which “move” inside each other. Their thickness grows in the direction of reading (left to right) and creates a sensation of movement that perfectly expresses the dynamic nature of this means of transport.

The wordmark uses Rotis SemiSans 65 Bold, in lowercase letters. The serifless yet contrasted typeface is part of Aicher’s Rotis superfamily, which also comprises Rotis SansSerif, Rotis SemiSerif, and Rotis Serif. The initial eight Rotis styles were released in 1988 for AGFA Compugraphic’s laser and digital imagesetters, followed by Postscript versions for desktop use.

On Issuu, Michael Weiss has shared the brand manual as published in November 1995 in three volumes; Vol. 1 (introduction, basic signs, materials), Vol. 2 (stationery, publications, promotion, advertising), and Vol. 3 (signage, rolling stock, equipment). In 2020, Metro Bilbao still uses the identity with Rotis SemiSans, with applications ranging from station signs to social media.

Casco Viejo station sign.

Areeta station, 2018.

“Trena geldi dagoenean sartu.” (Basque for “Enter when the train is stationary”), photographed in 2012.

Line diagrams show station names set on an angle.

Intercom system, 2019.

Trilingual sign; in Basque, Spanish, and English. Key info is also provided in Braille.

On this district plan, the English text is set in Rotis SemiSerif, which appears to be an exception.

Cover of a brochure with general contracting conditions, 2019.

“Masks with valves are not allowed”, 2020.

Sopelako dorrea / Torre de Sopela, 1999.

InProgress (Production Type) is used for a site-specific installation at Southwark station, London, commissioned by Art on the Underground from British artist Linder.

Linder created a 85 meter long piece of photomontage titled The Bower of Bliss, which “is a poetic euphemism for birthplace, for womb, for place of origin.” It’s displayed as street-level billboards that wrap around the entire façade of the station.

The typography employs several of the special features included in InProgress, like the underlined glyphs in the lowercase, or the discretionary ligatures (e.g. for HO, OR, EE, AR, TH, ER), some of which take the form of stacked letters (DE). The Bower of Bliss is on view until January 2020.

The artwork is announced via a poster that is displayed in every London Underground station.

The Moon and Stars Can Be Yours is a freewheeling, far-roaming investigation into the contemporary world of spiritualism that began with Duzant’s obsessive collection of psychic fliers on the New York City subway system combined with ephemera from the NYPL Pictures Collection. In an age of increasing uncertainty, the wave of modern mysticism is always present, eagerly waiting to fill the void created by our digital lives. Duzant weaves together research-based writing with anecdotal stories, inviting the reader along for a ritualistic search for meaning, following the path of the Spiritualist and New Age movements.

Magali Duzant’s The Moon and Stars Can Be Yours is playfully designed with holographic foil and neon paper stocks inspired by the fliers found on the subway. Millionaire (Script, Roman and Italic) set together with a grotesk like Neue Helvetica is a beautiful combination: the contrast between both creates a bold, original and contemporary typographic language.

Designed by Elana Schlenker and published by Conveyor Editions. Images by Whatnot Studio.

Probably the first public use of Logical in its early beta-state. This is Schauplatz Prinzenbude, a showroom by betonWare and CNC Prototypen inside the Prinzenstraße subway station on the U1 line in Berlin-Kreuzberg.

Exhibition design for the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn, by The Graphics Office (Angela Voulangas and Doug Clouse)

Hermannstraße station with a standard sign in FF Transit, the corporate typeface of the BVG as introduced by MetaDesign in the 1990s (left), and the new retro signage in U8.

The U8 typeface by Fatype is a revival of the old lettered signs found on subway stations in Berlin:

Anton [Koovit] started U8 as a research project about the Berlin subway system signage and particularly the U8 line that connects the northern borough of Reinickendorf with Neukölln in the south of the city, through the Alexanderplatz junction. His goals were to restore a piece of history, research a link between the DIN and Bauhaus, and translate the lettering of individual handcrafted station signage into a formal typeface.

Released in 2013, U8 soon after has come full circle: The digital reincarnation is used for the signs in two renovated stations of the U8 line, Hermannstraße (2013) and Boddinstraße (2014), designed by Barbara Dechant of the local Buchstabenmuseum. Leinestraße was renovated, too, but there, the new signs apparently are manual recreations based on the original, with less refined curves than in Fatype’s U8 typeface.

Read more about the revival project on Anton Koovit’s website. For more info about the renovation of the U8 line, see the article “Neue Wege im Dauerkampf gegen Graffiti-Schmierer” in Berliner Morgenpost from 11 November 2014.

Boddinstraße station in 2008 (left) and in February 2016 (right). The former features a different (intermediate?) style, bolder in weight and with a monocular ‘a’. Here’s an image of an older sign with the letterforms that presented the model for the U8 typeface.

Forever Faster recognizes athletes who stand out as individuals through both performance and personality. The campaign sees these sports men and women challenging convention and taking risks through determination, bravery, confidence and joy. Source: https://www.jwt.com/en/newyork/work/foreverfaster/

B.Z. is a German tabloid newspaper, published in Berlin. Their online edition makes use of the condensed widths of JAF Bernina Sans (which comes with five different weight and four widths). Headlines in JAF Bernina Sans can also be found on the news displays in Berlin underground trains, which seem to be implemented using web technology.