The typeface on the walls of the Toronto subway – or rather, none of the typefaces on any of the walls – is Gill Sans. A common mistake, one that Paul Arthur actually made – and, though he later corrected himself (incorrectly again, as we’ll see), he wanted the entire system to be typeset in actual Gill Sans:
It’s much too light for signage, and the usual difficulty of distinguishing 1, I, and l reaches its apotheosis in Gill Sans, since all those characters are a simple vertical line. Some of Paul Arthur’s drawings show a real 1, others the straight-line (also “real”) 1.
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2007.09.03 13:52. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: http://blog.fawny.org/2007/09/03/14atypi2b/
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