How Metro Agencies Design the Letter 'M' | Hacker News Reader

How Metro Agencies Design the Letter 'M'

bloomberg.com

64 pointsquakeguy42 comments

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I'm surprised they didn't include the SF Muni logo -- it has a really weird, almost unrecognizable M. Very distinctive.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Mu...

I'm distressed by the fact that the i is full instead of "double-stroked".

wait till you notice the i has a slightly different color :)

mun: #cd3545 i: #d02143

They ruled out logos where the M is not the main element. The Muni logo spells "muni" giving each letter roughly equal value.

The M is often used alone for SF Muni, as in the upper left corner here: https://www.sfmta.com/muni-transit

The interesting question isn't 'how', it's why.

E.g. one of the 'metro's in the UK is a tram system in Manchester. And the one thing people might call a 'metro', when compared to other cities and countries is the London Underground, which everyone including the government[1] calls The Tube. And that's just a red ring with a blue line through it.

The more I think about it, the more bizarre it makes us Brits sound. Tubes, choobs, toobays...

[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/tube/

The London Underground is the world's oldest underground railway. The very first line to be built was the Metropolitan Railway (now called the Metropolitan line), which opened in 1863.

So in a sense, you could say London was the first city to name their underground railway after the term "metropolitan".

In Dutch, "metro" refers to the underground, the subway. In the US it's the multi-modal metropolitan passenger transport system of a city or a region.

Germans don't get to play because here it's called U-Bahn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_transit_in_Germany#/medi...

Stockholm Tunnelbannan. T

* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stockholms_tunnelban...

Similar to the Norwegian symbol, that also has a circle around it.

https://no.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Oslo_T-bane_Logo.svg

Depends. Around here it's the Hochbahn. Wuppertal has the Schwebebahn, and a long time ago the Köln-Bonner Eisenbahn had the Silberpfeil racing along the Rheinuferbahn.

I'm only aware of one "Hochbahn" and that's just the name of the company operating the U-Bahn.

Yes? The name being a result of the way it operated at first, and still does so, in parts?

Direct link to the source (large images, sorted by similarity): http://mic-ro.com/metro/metrologos.html?size=lg&sort=similar...

Some of the agencies here don't fit the problem of 'M' meaning 'Metro', for example the last logo (Row 7) is described as Liverpool's metro system. It is not a metro system but a full train operating company and the 'M' is for Merseyrail

The Recife (Brazil) logo is just brilliant. https://mapa-metro.com/en/brazil/recife/recife-metro-map.htm

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has solved this one!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Bay_Transportati...

Stockholm as well (with a nearly identical solution!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_metro

In Chicago it's the 'L' (no lettermark that I'm aware of)

The MBTA T was actually designed with inspiration from Stockholm!

Same as Oslo, but with a different color

https://no.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Oslo_T-bane_Logo.svg

> ”The universal symbol for a city’s Metro system is a big “M.”

Not in London. Or Toronto. Or Hong Kong. Or New York. Or…

Or Singapore. Or any of the thirteen metro rail systems in India.

or Germany

The letter M comes from the Egyptian "water ripple" hieroglyph: 𓈖 I wonder what it thinks of its descendants.

Row two "Amsterdam" is also Rotterdam, although a different organization manages the metro's (RET instead of GVB).

The Bucharest Metro logo looks like the Wonder Woman emblem.

Now you mention it, yes it does a little… That's the company logo, though – station entrances use a simple blue sans-serif M.

A made-up problem, clearly requiring enormous resources to solve.

Creating a distinctive symbol to represent an entity to the general public is a made up problem?

What's the alternative? Have a paragraph of text on every sign? Perhaps: "This cavity provides access to a subterranean network of locomotives that provide a means to traverse the city"

Trying to stylise the letter M to be distinctive is pretty circuitous - just use an icon of a train! You remove the problem almost entirely, and get a symbol which is easily recognisable even to people who don’t speak the local language.

In Sydney, in the last 10 years our icons have been replaced by stylised letters. T stands for train (not Taxi or Tram), except when it doesn’t and M stands for Metro (which everyone still just calls the train), L stands for light rail (which everyone calls Trams)… it was so much more clear when there were just icons.

I'm curious to know if and how you would then distinguish between a metro and the national railway, or other types of railway. I suppose one could argue they should all have the same symbol, but I feel that distinction can be helpful to people using the services.

Maybe not the symbol, but the article artificially constraining itself to 'M' seems a bit suspect to me. In my country the symbol for the metro isn't even M [1]

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Singapor...

>What's the alternative?

Use the ISO 7001 symbols. https://iss.isolutions.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:pub:PUB400006:en

Personally I think they're ugly. Not always more ugly than a given 'M' though.

That page appears to show only one icon for trains, one for trams, and one for subways. No variation or alternative options.

I can see incorporating something like that into the signage around the facilities, or even in the logo, but the entire point of a logo is that it is relatively unique and distinctive and separate from all other things that might be like that — which is the exact opposite of this kind of standardized international icon.

(2015)!

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10626577

you know it'd be nice if these agencies stopped trying to be cute or original, and would just use some agreed upon standard design.

The metro system tends to be a source of pride for cities and their inhabitants, and I think there's room for a bit of diversity in this regard. I love the classy humanist typography and colours of the London Underground, but they certainly wouldn't fit the dinky Glasgow Subway.

And Glasgow can leverage graphic design in other interesting ways. The logo of the subway consists of a grey inner circle and an orange outer circle, representing the two lines which always run anti-clockwise and clockwise respectively. This colour scheme is used everywhere on the subway, so you always know which platform your train is at.

Really really great answer.

adding to this because someone else brought up ISO 7001:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7001

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