Fran Sans pays homage to the “raw and functional and mechanical” destination display on Muni’s recently retired trains.
Designer Emily Sneddon has taken design inspiration from an unlikely place — the thick, neon, jaundiced destination display on Muni's recently retired Breda trains. The result? A delightfully charismatic new font called Fran Sans.
As Peter Hartlaub writes for Yahoo, “Sneddon, who had no car, took the N-Judah and J-Church streetcars from her Duboce Park home to work and to explore the Sunset District on weekends. During these trips she was drawn to the lettering, built in geometric grids on 7-inch-high blocks, with chunky letters with swooping curves that looked like the typeface in an early 1980s arcade game.”
This sent Sneddon on a labyrinthine journey from an SFMTA electronics shop all the way back to the display’s original designer — an engineer.
Translating the lettering from its original purpose to a fully functional font provided some challenges. For example, letters that didn't appear on any streetcar route (like X and Q) didn’t exist and Fran Sans still doesn’t exist in lowercase due to the constraint rules of the design.
True to its purpose as a love letter to the city, Fran Sans is available for free.
Read the full story at the link below, and check out the designer’s personal essay about the new font here.
Read the full story: San Francisco has a new font. It was inspired by an old Muni streetcar
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