I love the different font styles being used in the subway stations, there's a wide range of them, with each telling a story from a different time.
As a Berliner, I probably have taken 100s of pictures of them or, in front of them, shared many moments on those stations. They are a core aspect of the city for me, representing change and, at the same time, the past.
It is based on someone's enormous body of CC-licensed photos of cities in Europe, especially their public transportation systems. [1] – I re-use the photos by assigning them to the station IDs in Berlin's official transit dataset. [2]
I feel the same here in Vienna, which has so much fascinating typography in the streets, its really quite inspiring.
I've long wanted to do some kind of google-streetmaps style photography project, taking pictures of all the types to be found in the nooks and cranny of the city, some of which go back centuries. I'd imagine having such a collection of Vienna City Types would be quite interesting to throw at some AI and produce real working fonts.
For typography nerds, cities such as Vienna and Berlin offer so much inspiration, although I would wager the distribution and density is better in Vienna, than Berlin - due simply to the fact that Berlin has a lot more space than Vienna does.
>I've long wanted to do some kind of google-streetmaps style photography project, taking pictures of all the types to be found in the nooks and cranny of the city, some of which go back centuries. I'd imagine having such a collection of Vienna City Types would be quite interesting to throw at some AI and produce real working fonts.
I enjoy the font diversity every time I visit - same, same - but different.
I hope there will be no drive to replace existing signs for new ones (unlikely, given the state of Berlin's finances) - the various fonts used on signage throughout the city makes up part of the quirkiness which makes Berlin so lovable.
I've had it on my list for ages, but never quite got around to it - I seldom get as far east as the Jannowitzbrücke, most of my friends are in Tiergarten/Moabit area.
Speaking of museums, one of the most charming museums I've ever been to in Berlin is the Ramonesmuseum by Schlesisches Tor. Helps being a fan, though.
It's most fitting how the messed up kerning in one of the newly renovated stations, Mehringdamm, conveys the slow decline of this country once striving for excellence.
FTA: “The regular and bold weights are available to all and can be downloaded for free from the campaign website: wir.berlin.” (URL: https://wir.berlin/kampagnen/die-typo)
Somehow related(?) but when I was in Berlin I noticed all buildings have a white square with a black number for the building number. This is consistent across most (all?) parts of the town but no local was able to explain me why or what's the background of that.
That's interesting... actually the directive only specifies that the numbers should have sufficient contrast against the background, be at least 10 cm large and have their own light source. So, while most seem to have settled on "black numbers on a white square", you are actually allowed to do something fancier if you want. Other cities (like Munich, which I mentioned in a sibling comment https://stadt.muenchen.de/rathaus/stadtrecht/vorschrift/310....) have more strict design rules, but don't require illuminated numbers.
Not sure about Berlin specifically, but many (most?) larger German cities have rules about how the house numbers should look like - after all, Germans love rules and regulations! And this is actually helpful, as it's much easier to find the house number on a house if they have a consistent look.
IMHO the Munich house numbers are better than the Berlin ones, as they also include the street name and (most of the time) an arrow pointing out the numbering direction (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:House_numbers_in...). Not sure what that font is called either though...
- must be placed at least 180 cm above ground, near the entrance or on the side facing a public road
- if the building is too far away from a public road for the number to be recognizable, it must be placed at the entrance of the premises, no lower than 90 cm above ground
- it must be made out of a material that can withstand weathering and provides good visibility of its shape and color
- for certain buildings (office buildings?) the numbers must be illuminated to be visible in low light conditions
I'm not going to go over the rest of the list as the lesson seems clear: some cities/municipalities have strict regulations, some barely have any, size doesn't really seem to be a deciding factor.
Only slightly related but at my house in rural France, at some point the way houses are numbered changed : each house now has a number which is the distance, in meters, from the beginning of the street (and probably with even/odd depending on which side of the street you're on: didn't check).
But, without asking, the authorities did install the new numbers plate on every single house. So it's all consistent, everywhere.
The official reason is if an ambulance or police car has to find a house: because previously none made sense it was hard to find (it's very sparsely populated). Now the idea is that the driver can just engage in the street and drive x meters and he'll be in front of the correct house.
I take it in Berlin there's t least something a bit related in that they have to be visible in case of an emergency (but I'm just guessing).
As a typechecking enthusiast, this title was extremely confusing. I guess it's a good reminder of how our brains routinely jump to premature conclusions as part of their specialization.
The "Language support" block features text in Latin, Cyrillic (Кириллицу) and Greek (normally Ελληνικά), but the text says Ελληυικά with an υ (upsilon, pronounced "i") instead of a ν (nu, pronounced "n"). Strange place to have a typo!
It's a shame they don't list ö, ä and ü (or ß) in their alphabet (although to be fair they are listed in the full list of glyphs) - those are pretty fundamental to .
I kinda like how they're done in the sign for Möckernbrücke - they also seem like an afterthought, desperately added in whatever space was avaliable! See https://www.dreamstime.com/metro-train-station-sign-m%C3%B6c... (apologies for the awful, watermarked photo).
I generally dislike these "corporate design" typefaces, because - just like this one - the character set is usually quite small and they're almost never a complete set of styles and cuts - just like this one is just two styles, regular and bold. No italics, for example. Nevermind things like self-declared companies who lack a mono-space font in their corporate design suite (strangely enough they never lack a dedicated Powerpoint headline font).
Let me guess, massive amounts of taxpayers money was paid to them to create this font, that they do not even open source and allow no modifications and such.
Also, the font looks pretty generic and nothing special or unique. I do not see much value here, there are probably 100 fonts that look pretty similar to this.
While I understand the need or desire of a capital city like Berlin to have “good design” and advertise, i.e. “I <3 NY” a font seems deep in the rabbit hole.
Is there much prior example of other metropolis making this deep of a design choice on small details like a custom font?
You are right but there is a difference between a good advertising agency (JvM) and a good design agency...
Looking at the advertising award shows in 2022 and 2021 this also seems to be a "gold" idea so Berlin got probably a big discount if they paid anything at all. All for the awards...
Don't look what Jung von Matt Tech does or you gonna cry :D
I think JvM Tech is more of a "vertical integration" than replicating in tech what JvM does in advertising.
I'm also not convinced most of their customers get a significant ROI from picking them over more "down to earth" agencies. I think in many cases it's just wanting to have some of the prestige of JvM without actually being a good fit for them.
Basically if you've seen any catchy ad campaign on German television in the past thirty years it was probably made by them. You don't have to like their work or think that it's good but they've been extremely successful and so have been many of their campaigns.
I live in Germany and never heard of any of those. Maybe I’m not the target demographic. The only catchy campaign I’m aware of is the traffic light coalition campaign but that was written by life. Good acting, though.
The Saturn one (Geiz ist geil!) was unavoidable in the 2000s. The Edeka one (Supergeil) was a viral social media hit in the mid-2010s. I can understand missing out on the second one if you weren't paying attention to German social media but if you were old enough in the 2000s to know what an ad is I have no idea how you managed to avoid that. And even then you'd have at least heard of the phrase because the ads put it back into popular discourse with right-wing politicians chastising consumers for their "Geiz ist geil" mentality.
The Sparkasse ads were also from the mid-2010s. They were basically very beige board meetings of the "08/15 Bank" (08/15 meaning "standard issue" or "run of the mill" in German though the exact origin is disputed - likely somehow relating to the MG 08/15 machine gun of WW1). You couldn't really sit through an ad break without seeing one.
Not sure if that compares if you mean the use in the ad. "08/15" (often "null acht fuffzehn" rather than "fünfzehn") is a widely used colloquialism in the same way as "standard issue" in English and most people have no idea of its origins. Wikipedia suggests it is very likely tied to that specific machine gun but the exact reasons seem to be lost to time.
As a Berliner, I probably have taken 100s of pictures of them or, in front of them, shared many moments on those stations. They are a core aspect of the city for me, representing change and, at the same time, the past.