Truly random post ahead.
Passing through Newcastle (England) last week, I noticed a very distinctive font in use on the Metro (urban rail, mostly overground) – it was hard to miss when painted in huge letters on the walls of stations! A little bit of investigation turns up the information that it is called Calvert, named after its creator, the well-known designer Margaret Calvert.
Calvert was one half of the pair of designers, working for a committee, that created the British road sign system (the pictures, the colour schemes, the font (“Transport“), and more. Jock Kinneir was Calvert’s boss: there’s a good summary of their work here. Calvert and Kinneir also designed Rail Alphabet for British Rail, which replaced Gill Sans (itself popping back into view this month through the Penguin Celebrations series).
All this leads into Dublin Bus having a new identity (old and new below) that I find quite striking – it is very sans serif (like Rail Alphabet and Transport) and quite different to the existing CIE 2000 (used by buses and trains, designed as a millennium celebration of some sort, it seems).
(For non-Dubs: the odd logo is based on the initials DB and the ‘castle’ motif of the city’s crest)
So, what do you think of the new US Clearview Highway font, as discussed here in the New York Times?