Berlin TYPE: The official type for the city of Berlin (2020)

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]

[1] https://flickr.com/photos/ingolfbln/albums/ [2] https://github.com/derhuerst/vbb-station-photos

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 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 looked it up. Of course we have a law for that: https://gesetze.berlin.de/bsbe/document/jlr-GrNrVBEV3P4

The sign has to be visible at night, coming from both directions and needs to be at least 10cm large... That's basically it.

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...

Usually they increase from the city center outwards, even numbers on the right side, odd numbers on the left.

We write them always after the street name, which drives Google Maps and other badly internalized software nuts.

Buildings don't have official names, some have informal ones, like the Gropius Bau.

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).

Is there much prior example of other metropolis making this deep of a design choice on small details like a custom font?