Hamburg Airport signs
Airport signage in Hamburg. Main locations such as check-in, terminals and gates are in the sans serif typeface Univers, secondary locations such as toilets, restaurants, cafés are in the serif typeface Sabon.
[Further quoting from Albert-Jan Pool’s comments:]
Serifs and signage can go together very well, it’s rather the thin strokes often being too thin (or too thick, in case of a Slab / Egyptian) or the spacing being too tight, the contrast between the luminance densities of type and background being too high (especially in back-lit signage) and the surface being too glossy.
Personally, I don’t care about ‘old’ that much. I think that for white-on-black signage, especially for the back-lit signs, the spacing should have been slightly wider and the thin strokes a bit thicker. Also the ‘o’ of the italic is far too wide, because Sabon was drawn for Linotype duplex-matrices. So in the end, maybe Sabon is just not ‘old’ enough :–) A revived Garamond, based on smaller sizes for letterpress could lead to a better result. From a stylistic point of view, I’d rather prefer a contemporary Garalde such as Swift as a secondary typeface for an airport.
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Sabon was also used for signage on Berlin’s Museum Island, albeit more for information than for wayfinding.