[Barclays Expert Sans Font Full
Kym Cavrak
Mosaic name tablets are by far my favorite feature of the Subway. These pieces of lettering built from ceramic tiles declare station names for Subway riders, while smaller versions provide extra wayfinding help within stations. Making this source of inspiration into a typeface is a project I have been imagining and sketching since moving to NYC in 2014, then more actively developing as a font family since the end of 2019.
Even if I had found blueprints, this project would have required creativity and adaptation. For one thing, the mosaics only contain the basic English uppercase alphabet, plus numbers and a few extra symbols like arrows and ampersands. I was always going to have to invent the lowercase, extended Latin alphabet, accents, and symbol set.
And thus, I have sought to build a typeface that captures the best energy and spirit of the Subway mosaics but which is genuinely useful to designers working in digital systems, wayfinding, and graphic design.
But, that disappearingly thin weight is a hidden feature: it allows Name Sans to animate in and out from this core. This can be especially useful in characters that maintain a common width between weights, like arrows and tabular numbers (activated with feature tnum). If any wine label designers are out there, the Hairline characters would also look preeetty nice printed at a large size on a wine label. Just an idea...
To understand Name Sans, it is essential to first have an idea of what optical sizing is. The optical sizes of a typeface are made to preserve its design intent at different sizes. In this way, optical sizes are fairly similar to font weights, which are usually made to preserve the design of a typeface at different relative levels of thickness or density.
Just as there is no single answer to how every typeface should be designed for different weights, there are many ways to design for different sizes. Generally, though, there are some common strategies:
You can start to understand how a typeface handles optical sizing by placing different optical-size styles at the same scale. In Name Sans, this highlights the change of spacing, kerning, proportions, and shaping.
I doubt it is possible to precisely determine the design goals of the designers of the original Subway mosaics, but my speculation is that they had similar goals: make letters that were geometric, but also natural.
Some fonts prioritize strict geometric shaping, and that can work. But, such typefaces are accepting a trade-off. If a typeface upholds strict geometry over other goals like optical consistency, it will inevitably take on a decorative aesthetic.
Such considerations are also important between different optical sizes. In the Display sizes, the o can be very circular, but in Text, the o must be made much more similar to the width of n to avoid an excessively-wide appearance in running text.
It might be that our eyes are just used to reading certain fonts, and it may be an effect of our eyes rapidly moving horizontally when we read. Either way, anything close to an actual circle will look oblong in running text, so Name Sans accounts for this. Display styles emphasize geometry at a large scale, while Standard & Text styles attempt to look geometric-but-not-distractingly-so.
Even though I want to capture the charm of the Subway mosaics, charm is not only achieved through decoration. Instead, I seek to create something which balances geometry and nuance, in order to provide genuine utility for a wide range of applications. So, in Name Sans, the not-quite-circularity is just as critical as the circularity.
Most sans-serifs take one extreme or the other on their treatment of vertices. Broadly speaking, they either take the Futura route with pencil-sharp points or the Helvetica route of prioritizing evenness of strokes, proportions, and color without really considering vertices. I like that the mosaics take a practical, in-between approach: they have vertices that are slightly sharp and a little bit blunt. Naturally, I have sought to preserve this in Name Sans.
Like every aspect of Name Sans, this approach to sharpness is adapted across optical sizes to be ideal at large, medium, and small sizes. As the opsz decreases, the stem sharpness is dialed up to preserve this visual feature.
The Subway mosaics can get away flaunting convention because they are large and seldom include very much content. In making Name Sans, I have found that the larger optical sizes can come close to matching that uncompromising approach.
Meanwhile, many of the optical conventions bucked by Name Sans Display are normalized a little bit in smaller optical sizes: horizontal strokes get a bit thinner, the S and B become a bit more traditionally balanced, the 5 gets a bit of a slant, and so on. This makes Text styles a little more familiar to read, while still keeping things lively.
Often, the most striking feature of the Subway mosaics is how they seem to defy the physical limitations you might expect of rectangular tiles. The way that letters will gracefully, fluidly curve shows that the mosaic letterers were occasionally just showing off. This is even more striking in the serif styles of lettering and in other signage sprinkled throughout the system, but that is a topic for another project.
A primary example: the terminal angles and aperture tightness of sans-serif letters have a big impact on the tone of a typeface. What is the most obvious way to handle this aspect of a design? What would be obvious within the mosaics?
In earlier versions of Name Sans, opening shapes of many characters were tight, in response to other popular & historical grotesque typefaces. They have since been widened to more closely reflect observed lettering of the NYC mosaics.
There are a few exceptions to the open apertures. The Black & Ultra weights, which are pretty unabashedly of my own invention, exaggerate the system into purely display territory. Here, the apertures do close off to avoid overly large whitespaces in text. Likewise, some tabular figures are fairly wide across all weights, so numbers like 2 and 3 have more-horizontal terminals in their tabular versions.
But again, the lowercase did not have precedents, and therefore, I simply had to choose what looked more obvious in text. I will freely admit that, because I spend hours of every day reading fonts like Helvetica and Apple SF, my eyes are biased. It could be that I chose to follow these examples because I found them visually familiar and knew others would as well.
A much more basic explanation is possible, too: sharp connections add extra angles to letters, which add up to more visual complexity on the zoomed-out level of words and text. In the case of Name Sans, it feels best to avoid this type of visual complexity.
(Just in case anyone is reading this and happens to be considering font defaults for document-creation software: In the case of a font intended for books or multi-page documents, I would instead lean towards a humanist model. Perhaps this is also because I am used to that, but perhaps also because its dynamic presence helps my eyes maintain forward momentum in text when there is truly a lot of it.)
In the case of Name Sans, I would see it as a major missed opportunity to disregard the many, many stations that have rectangular caps for their mosaic signage. So, rectangular caps can be activated with Stylistic Set 1.
Simply put, Name Sans is not an accidental design. Every visual aspect of it ties back to mosaics (or occasionally newer) signage in the Subway. I am still learning, and there are still a few decisions that I am turning over in my head and in my sketches, but I am becoming more certain that I have found the right way to balance the many influences of Name Sans into a varied but cohesive type family.
(Spoiler alert: the italics will be pretty boring. They may have a single-story a on by default, but will otherwise be a sloped (and optically corrected) version of the uprights. I am working to keep these as geometric as possible, so they can work seamlessly with the intent of the family as a whole.)
Allowed usesYou may use the licensed fonts to create images on any surface such as computer screens, paper, web pages, photographs, movie credits, printed material, T-shirts, and other surfaces where the image is a fixed size.You may use the licensed fonts to create EPS files or other scalable drawings provided that such files are only used by ...
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Barclays font here refers to the font used in the logo of Barclays, which is a British multinational banking and financial services company founded in 1690. The font used for the Barclays logotype is very similar to Baker Signet designed by Arthur Baker. The font is a commercial one and you can view more details about it here.
On Tuesday evening we made another release of changes to GOV.UK. One of the biggest areas of discussion centered around the typography changes. Ben Terrett, Head of Design, explains the choices which have been made and why.
This is pretty brutal, but it focuses the mind. What are we using different typefaces for? How many different sizes do we need? We agreed to try and only use three different type styles per page. It's not a solid rule, but it's a good place to start from.
The original is a bit bold for web use, but Margaret has been working with Henrik Kubel on a new digital version with six new weights called New Transport. Calvert and Kubel have let us trial this version on the latest release, in two different weights.
It's a beautiful face, extremely legible with some nice quirky characteristics (the commas are particularly nice). There's obviously a lovely symmetry to using the typeface from the road sign project as I've written before. Or, as Margaret puts it, "It is really exciting to see New Transport used for the first time, online, for the Government's [beta] website... Almost as exciting as driving down the M1 for the first time."
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