Palats Sportu (Палац Спорту) station sign of Kyiv Metro
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.
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.”
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.
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.
1 Comment on “Palats Sportu (Палац Спорту) station sign of Kyiv Metro”
Yevgen mentioned the Kyiv Metro Fonts. I’d like to add a bit more about this cool project.
This series of typefaces based on metro station signs in the Ukrainian capital was started in a workshop with students (Olesia Bachyns’ka, Roman Baranovsky, Galya Dautova, Andriy Holubokiy, Nazariy Kondratiuk, Dasha Lennhren, Mykyta Maltsev, Matvii Masliukov, Oleksandr Piddubniy, Yevhen Spizhovyi) conducted by Yevgeniy Anfalov and Oleś Gergun in summer 2023. Five typefaces were finished and released by Kyiv Type Foundry, with more to follow. The fonts can be downloaded for free, and are free to use for Ukrainians. Others are asked for a donation in support of Ukrainians in need.
KTF Metro Sport is a digital interpretation of New York 30, but an indirect one: it was reverse-enginereed from the nine Cyrillic letters of the station sign – some of which are repurposed Latin glyphs, with some others (ПЛЦ) being original additions by Alyoshkin (as New York 30 is Latin only) – plus the eight Latin letters from the Megavideo logo found at a later point. As such, it shares the same concept as Meuffels’ original, but is different in glyphs that weren’t included in the source material. From this basis, the designers drew a full typeface with support for Cyrillic and Latin.
Learn more about KTF Metro Sport and its cousin fonts Blueline, Botanical, Roman, Xarkiv and the in-progress Contract on the detailed microsite.