London Underground Dot Matrix Typeface | Hacker News Reader

London Underground Dot Matrix Typeface

github.com

471 pointsnickswalker65 comments

Heh, reminds me of the early 90s, when I was making my first attempts at complete videogames. I fell in love with the Lucasfilm games, specifically Monkey Island, so I started to build my own graphic adventure engine.

I wanted to have the same look, and I naively thought the same fonts would be important (and conveniently ignored the question of how to make high quality art, since I suck as an artist). So I got some graph paper and copied the two fonts by hand, pixel by pixel, off the screen -- the bold font with an outline used for dialogue, and the skinnier font used for the UI.

I never finished that graphic adventure (mainly due to not really having a plot, not due to technical difficulties), but the fonts looked pretty convincing! I think I still have that graph paper with the fonts in some box in the basement.

PS: OMG, I found an actual screenshot! https://gabrielgambetta.com/files/ne2.png Please enjoy my terrible 3D Studio skills and even wrose pixel art skills XD

I did a similar thing re-creating the font used by the VBZ in Zürich, Switzerland.

https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vbz-fahrgastinformation/#...

The actual physical display here is great too. Certainly the London ones a key part of the aesthetic is the orange LEDs. How is the brightness and power consumption?

I built a programmable one a while back[1] with the primary use case being TfL departures. I have hooked it up to a smart plug with energy consumption metrics and the max it uses is around 0.53Wh every 10 minutes.

At one point I considered selling it, but with the amount of legal stuff around CE marking I got demotivated. Plus these days you have https://tidbyt.com/.

1 - https://twitter.com/d0m96/status/1427055272980328460

One thing I couldn't figure out (but you might know) for Tidybyt was: Can it be told to use a different server, supposing that the present makers went away? Without that, I have to consider the lifetime of the device is entwined with the lifetime of the makers.

No idea I'm afraid

= 3.18 W

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

I'm not a native speaker of English, but pretty sure that the word "tic" [sic] is not what you want. Look into apostrophes [1].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27_(disambiguation)

I recently got to see the official documentation on the departure sign and it refers to what I called the "tic" as "Hochkomma" which would be a "quote" symbol.

The font looks like a familiar one from Windows, maybe Tahoma?

I recently found out that it's a custom font designed by a "Herrn Buser" known as "Buser BöV Schrift". It was specifically made to be readable by visually impaired persons from a larger distance.

The London Underground Regular font struck me as quite peculiar when I encountered it on a trip a few years back. The decision to lower the baseline for uppercase letters is highly nonstandard – I’m not aware of any other Latin-based digital signage system in the world that does that.

I wonder if it was the result of a study that concluded visibility was slightly increased over a consistent baseline due to the extra pixel of height for caps. Whatever the reason, it certainly gives the signs a quirky character (no pun intended).

I've always assumed it's a nod to the original underground signage which had offset capital letters (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/London_U...).

Was wondering the same thing. If you look at some of the station displays pictured, you can see that there‘s not much space between lines, so I assume this is to have space for descenders without clashing with the lines below (more like raising the baseline for non-capital letters).

Yep, see the screenshot with Epping on the display for example.

It makes the capitals stand out more and I imagine it could be helpful for visitors who may have trouble remembering long sequences of Latin characters and may pictorially memorize the capital letters instead.

I might be feeling particularly cynical but I don’t get the feeling these were based off any study.

Anyway, it works ok for most of the characters but it’s quite jarring for the Ki because it looks like the K descends into the i’s cell (though it doesn’t).

Britain has several commissioned fonts for public signage [1] [2] [etc], and generally has very high quality road and rail signage — in most cases both the design and the content.

I'd be surprised if these fonts were not based on a study, or developed as part of a study to find a particularly legible dot-matrix font.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_(typeface)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Alphabet

Edit: I think we need TfL document 1-312 "Automated audio and visual information in public areas of stations and trains", but I can't find it online. Only the newer standards using LCD displays:

TfL Digital display standards: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-digital-display-standards.pdf

London Underground Good Practice Guide: Onboard Electronic Signing: http://www.signdesignsociety.co.uk/images/Knowledgebase/TfL_...

I was speaking from personal experience with past industrial projects commissioned with lcd/led displays - albeit admittedly not with the British government as a client. Thanks for those links, I will have to study them!

I figured the result was dictated by the specific dimensions and display density of hardware that matched the brightness/environment/size/etc requirements they set forth.

I know the care that goes into finding fonts for standardized government use (road signs, national parks, etc) but imagined this particular set of circumstances was confined to the displays commissioned in that particular round of updates and decided by the contractor and the liaison officials.

I think it may just be because it looks less weird than only pushing up the characters with descenders, like in HD44780 LCDs.

it also greatly increases the visibility / contrast for ALL-CAPS which looks to be quite common in these signs. while allowing for the qgyj letters that descend one pixel below baseline

For more British-y rail stuff, check out Geoff Marshall's channel:

* https://www.youtube.com/@geofftech2/videos

A few years ago, he and his girlfriend/partner (Vicki) visited all (then) 2,563 railway stations in England, Wales, and Scotland:

* http://allthestations.co.uk

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Stations

* https://www.youtube.com/c/allthestations

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16461196

I wish Vienna, Austria used nice fonts worth copying in their electronic signs, but alas... https://imgur.com/CQ1dYqk

Wow, that looks like a scalable font was rasterized at a resolution where hinting would be required… but the font didn’t actually have hinting.

Lol it's like each character was developed in a vacuum and someone forget to tell the W creator there was a width limit until too late. Maybe an allegory to modern corporate software development there...

Oof, that's grim typography, my condolences

thanks, i hate it

I always wondered what tech/programming was behind the notification boards on trains and in train stations. Do each station custom build their own solution, or is there a company who provides this to TFL/UK stations?

There's a couple of pubs in London (specifically close to underground stations) which have a notification boards above the bar for the next trains coming in and peering behind the notification display I see a Raspberry Pi dangling...

I think the companies providing railway signalling systems, like Thales, Alstom, Hitachi, Siemens, Westinghouse, would be most likely to supply this sort of system — or more likely, supply the system behind it but outsource the displays.

Here's the company that manufactured the ones for National Rail: https://trueform.com/products/next-train-indicator-nti/

Actual on-station signage will mostly be from a set of standard parts from railway suppliers.

https://wiki.openraildata.com/ has information about various open data feeds available for the railways in Great Britain, and https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/ for TfL. Third party solutions for things like railway adjacent bars presumably use one of these to get departures board info etc.

For "London Underground Medium", it's almost certain this technology is character based (it's not archaic enough to be hand-crafted values) and so somebody with even test access to a 1996 stock (ie Jubilee Line trains) can presumably tell one to display notices with the desired characters: F K Qq U V X Y Z and take a photo without it ever being in service.

On the other hand, the 1995 stock is very similar, same vendor, same era, likely identical display panels so I'd expect you could collect some of this data (e.g. London Zoo is accessed via the Northern Line, and that's a Z right there if the display mentions this) from those trains and assume it's the same.

K should be easy to get when the next station is Kingsbury, and Q is available at the following stop, Queensbury. F from Finchley Road.

U might show as "London Underground" at some point.

Does V show in "Change for the Victoria Line"? I can't remember if these trains show that.

There is the tube stop called “Victoria” also.

They have done a great job on these fonts btw. They are instantly recognisable to any Londoner.

I think fonts and typography all across the UK is excellent. See also British Rail, and all the road signs.

As a Britisher exported to the USA, the fonts and typography of government projects here regularly gives me the heebie-jeebies. I can't even bear to look at the highway signage.

London fonts in general are very recognizable. The print one with rhomboid dots, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_(typeface)

Agreed, it's extremely distinctive.

It needs to be a stop on the Jubilee (or possibly Bakerloo) line, as the relevant dot matrix is only installed on one (or possibly two) types of train.

If we’re talking about the same thing they have that same font on the circle and district line, which goes through victoria. Source: am on a district line train now and went through Victoria a few minutes ago

After London City Airport comes "King George V"

Love this. Would be a great addition to the 'model my local tube station' project that's probably going to remain on my to-do list for ever

Ha ha I dreamed of doing that as a kid not living in London but thinking the tube is pretty cool

Section 2.13 (page 32) has the matrix used on tram stops: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tramlink-stop-signs-standard.pdf

P56 has what looks like the same font for London Overground: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/overground-signs-standard.pdf

And P47 for the DLR: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/dlr-signs-standard.pdf

Also see British Rail which had an equally outsized effect on UK typography, and was (and continues to be) very beautiful in my eyes:

https://britishrailmanual.com/

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

I backed the British Rail Corporate Identity Manual project on Kickstarter. It's a wonderful book. My copies were slightly damaged in transit and they were replaced. I still have the 3 slightly damaged ones (dings on the cover, mostly) and if anyone wants them you can have them for the price of postage from the US. Ping me at the email in my bio.

Lovely stuff. Now someone please use this in a Bioshock-like adventure based in London's semi-apocalyptic west end.

https://fallout4london.com/ ?

Stockholm subway had a nice font. Digital version is called esseltube. https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esseltub

That's a printed font though.

BTW, Stockholm's subway used to up until very recently have dot-matrix LED signs with what I think did a neat embedded-programming trick. They could switch between a static message and scrolling text, but the scrolling text was slanted.

I think the slanting was done by varying the timing for each row of LEDs. The bottom row was scrolled first, then the next above it after a short delay, and so on.

I have been thinking of trying that trick for making scrolling text legible on a keyboard with backlit keys in a traditional row-staggered configuration. But I would first need a keyboard PCB for DIY with individually addressable LEDs.

This italic scrolling was pretty standard on any LED sign in the 80s and 90s. I always assumed that, rather than a stylistic choice, it was just caused by the lines updating one after another because of update or display multiplexing speed.

Interesting. I think the easiest way would to have each row on its own shift registers. It'd be trivial but if each pixel was on LED you could only slant at 45° intervals, which would be annoying.

Maybe make each pixel 2LED×1LED (vertical).

This would be the equivalent of shifting it by adding an offset to the characterset bitmap that depends on the position vertically in glyph.

There is something vaguely solipsistic about this project—the creator apparently didn't try to contact TfL to ask if the designer of these displays was still around. Meanwhile Tfl put a lot of effort into memorializing their typographic tradition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIAxVW-9fRo

Without meaning to sneer, I can't help noticing this project represents a really trivial engagement with typography (dot matrix characters are really simply to copy). There's no craft involved, obviously, and not necessarily any taste either. Typography and graphic design in general are full of those things. Maybe the designers of the signage would have been able to shed some light on those aspects...

What exactly were you expecting, a thesis project or documentary or something? As far as I can tell, petykowski just wanted to recreate the typefaces used on the Underground's digital signage. That's fine. Not everything has to be some magnum opus.

I'm speaking as a graphic designer who's been obsessed with typography for decades. Craft and taste are qualities I ordinarily pay a lot of attention to, and if petykowski had talked to anyone affiliated with these typefaces, I'm sure it would have been fascinating. But it's also important to remember that these faces are not in the same category as a high-end serif or something. They serve a bluntly functional purpose. The medium for which they're designed is entirely different. Of course they're simple and easy to copy; that's the point.

So I'm not sure how you are defining "craft" or "taste" here. These designs are crisp and legible. Your comment feels a little like somebody looking at an icon of Clarus the Dogcow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow) and saying "Ah, but where's the dimensionality? Where's the realism? Can this truly be considered a rendering of an animal? How lazy."

I personally love pixel/dot-matrix typefaces. I hadn't known about this project, so I'm grateful that somebody went to the trouble of doing this.

What is the point of this reply? This is a set of font files, not an oral history project. The creator is not claiming that this is evidence of their craft or taste.

Makes me think of...

In my experience, there are primarily two kinds of graphical designers. (I don't have direct experience working with font designers, but I imagine they are kind of similar.)

1. Those who are great at it. They also tend to be humble and understand that often excruciating and boring iteration is critical in producing something great. When you find someone like this, hold on to them, whatever the cost.

2. Those who really want to be great at it but kinda aren't. They tend to develop a smug asshole attitude, perhaps as a defense mechanism. They often think their first iteration is a masterpiece that cannot be improved upon.

And there's a much larger superset/variant of the last kind that essentially consists of smug assholes who define themselves as being able to appreciate "good design", which invariably is defined as Apple's style of design.

Neato - I made an RPI bus arrival sign for my desk, wondering if I can repurpose these fonts.

Does it show you the actual bus schedule, or does it it show some other information?

I’ve always loved how the capital letter extend below the baseline.

Very soothing, I fail to know if it's nostalgia or if these geometric primitive based fonts are really massaging your brain positively

The Madonna video Ray of light is filmed in one of the few stations that still have the old font

I think those are all of Stockholm's subway, station Hötorget and the Central Station. The director Jonas Åkerlund likes to sneak in images of his home town. He also used a clip from a game show on Swedish TV without permission.

This is great

Great work!

How is this different from any dot matrix typeface of that time period? I doubt these fonts were made just for London Underground.

I wouldn't be surprised if the font is unique to the London Underground.

At least the first display's font is fairly distinct, I haven't noticed it elsewhere. The bottom of the capital letters is a pixel lower than the lowercase letters.

Printed signs from Transport for London use Johnston Sans, noticeable with the diamond-shape dots on "i" and "j": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_(typeface)

Looks pretty similar to the font used on the Tyne and Wear Metro[0], though I have heard the metro's signage is made up of hand-me-downs from the tube anyway.

[0]https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com