Toronto Subway Bold Font Free 11
Niki Wienberg
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Toronto Subway is based on the lettering originally used for station identification and signs by the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) in the Toronto, Canada, subway system. The first subway line opened in 1954. However, the original lettering remains unique. The lettering on the original signage consists only of uppercase characters and a few bits of punctuation in two weights: Regular and Bold, introduced in 2004. The Toronto Subway fonts were developed from rubbings of the lettering etched into station walls and photographs of painted signs. The overall style of the lettering is very mechanical, almost naive, yet still having a certain amount of elegance. This style was followed as much as possible in creating the extra lowercase, punctuation and other special characters. The Toronto Subway family was expanded in 2014 with the addition of the Light and Black weights.
Toronto Subway[1][2] is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed for the original section of the Toronto Transit Commission's Yonge subway. It is today used at station entrances, fare booths and track level signage throughout the system.[3]
The font was recreated by David Vereschagin in 2004. Because the original designer of the font is unknown, and no documentation of the font had been kept, Vereschagin digitized the font by visiting stations and making rubbings of the letters on the original Vitrolite glass tiles as well as taking photographs.[2] This is now used by the TTC as their font for station names.[2] Vereschagin designed a matching lowercase, inspired by Futura and other similar designs. As one of the few typeface designs to have originated in Canada, it was used in a number of zines as a mark of local pride.[6]
Often misidentified as Gill Sans[by whom?], the Toronto Subway font is based on Futura. Somewhat similar typefaces include Johnston (used by Transport for London), Verlag, Bernhard Gothic, Metro, Brandon Grotesque, Neutraface, and Eagle.
Only 23 stations are wheelchair-accessible. By Ontario provincial law (AODA 2005), the entire transit system must be accessible to people with disabilities by the year 2020. TTC runs an expensive, limited, and unwieldy paratransit service, Wheel-Trans, for people who cannot use the regular transit system.
More recently, TTC has come to realize that fans are exactly the wrong people to alienate. For example, the Commission sent several employees, including the acting chief general manager and the elected chair of the TTC, to Transit Camp.
The Toronto subway has a typeface all its own. You can compare it to a few other fonts, but no other face is exactly the same. And, for 50 years, pretty much the only place you found it was on permanent, virtually indestructible wall signage.
The typeface, in its original form, is a geometric sansserif in upper case only, with ten numerals, ampersand, period, and apostrophe, and an arrow (though a few other arrows are found on period signage).
By all accounts, no one alive today knows who designed the Toronto subway typeface. The original drawings (TTC 1960) do not credit an artist. (Since the drawings are dated 1960.12.12, they were drawn after the first installation of letters on a subway wall. That makes the absence of credit even more surprising; it may mean the designer had already been forgotten six years after the subway opened.)
To this day, Eglinton retains its original Vitrolite tiles on most walls and, like St. Clair, still uses its light weight of the TTC font. But fonts were changed on most other stations on the original Yonge line.
The Yonge-University line was extended in the 1970s along Spadina Rd. All those new stations had a public-art component, some of it quite spectacular. And all of them used Univers for station names on walls.
For some reason, signage in the TTC is under the control of the marketing and public affairs department rather than, say, engineering or architecture. Placement of signage in the marketing department essentially equates wayfinding signage with advertising.
A great many of the original enamelled-steel signs from the 1950s or 1960s are still in place. Most are attractive and most appear to be functional, though a few small signs with multiple arrows look confusing.
Signs were posted in the 1980s and (more commonly) the 1990s using Helvetica and a number of different arrows and pictographs. A common form uses an arrow cut out of negative space in a positive circle.
The addition of necessary signage over the years to keep up with transit improvements and ongoing development around the stations, as well as the upgrading of signage as stations have been renovated, has resulted in a signage format which is similar but inconsistent in its application in all stations. In many cases, signage which has been added has, of necessity, been placed in a position blocking other signage, giving an unsystematic and cluttered look resulting in customer confusion. This is especially true in some of the high-volume transfer stations such as St. George and Bloor.
The decision to recommend this letterform was not based exclusively on its legibility, although that is important, but there are, however, many other equally legible letterforms. Nor was it based solely on historical accuracy.
Once the decision was made to select a sanserif over a serif face, there is very little, if anything, to choose from between the candidates from the standpoint of legibility. They are all equally so and there is, moreover, relatively little difference in legibility between regular and bold weights. They, too, are equal in this regard.
Eliminating confusing names for subway lines, like Yonge-University-Spadina and Bloor-Danforth. Instead, all lines were numbered, and the existing but underplayed line colours would go into serious use for the first time.
Simplified route maps in subway stations. Among other things, one candidate subway-line map showed only the stations you could actually reach on that line, not the stations behind the current station.
Under this system, what used to be Bay station on the Bloor-Danforth subway line became Bay station, with a specific icon, on green Line 2. Signage not only used the line colour, it named the line colour: GREEN LINE. That was useful, because two of the three existing line colours, yellow and green, can be difficult or impossible to distinguish for colourblind people (protans more than deutans).
The Arthur redesign was user-tested. Initially, a prototype sign system was to be installed at busy Union station at the south end of downtown, which connects (via separate buildings) with commuter and inter-city rail lines. Extensive documentation was drawn up to specify signs for Union station. But ultimately St. George was chosen as a test site. It is a downtown station that acts as an interchange between the Bloor-Danforth and Yonge-University-Spadina lines (that is, between yellow Line 1 and green Line 2). The budget for the entire design and installation of the sign prototype was between $220,000 and $315,000 (Arthur 1992c,d).
All groups stated a preference for the Arthur redesign. Only the results for the general population were statistically significant, and the test concerned user attitudes rather than performance in tasks. (Some questions were asked about how often the users had had problems with TTC signage in the past.)
The research was an opinion survey only, not a performance test. There was no testing that involved asking comparable groups to carry out a task (like getting from point A to point B) with one or the other of the signage systems.
Overhead maps always showed subway-line directions as horizontal lines, even for routes running north and south. But straightening out the loop of the Yonge-University-Spadina line (from Finch down to Union up to Wilson) put both ends of the map at direction north, N. There were not a lot of options given that the signboards were horizontal. But existing TTC bus and streetcar route maps posted on poles at street level tend to use a vertical orientation even for east-west routes. Sign orientation dictates map orientation.
Designing the pictographs for all stations represented an enormous amount of work in distilling the meaning of station names, their histories, or their locations into a simple picture. Mosticons for stations were drawn laboriously by Lance Wyman, who often had trouble summing up station identities in one glyph. Arthur originally assumed that researching the origins of station names would be tedious, but found a local historian, Mike Filey, who had the information at the ready (Arthur 1992b). At least a dozen pictographs were drawn, sometimes in more than one version.
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