Bureausign font

The art director asks for a wayfinding typeface. There are still not many Cyrillic typefaces for wayfinding, but we want to have our own corporate one.

We agree on the task: to make an expressive wayfinding typeface with personality, which will be good to design wayfinding in airports, stations, schools, polyclinics, etc. The typeface should include icons. Pictograms, especially in wayfinding, have the same relation to typography as all other glyphs in a font.

We study existing wayfinding systems in different countries. Let’s see what fonts are used at airports, train stations, subways. We identify the features of our future typeface.

When creating a font, readability is usually the first priority. Readability is how easily and efficiently a block of text can be read. Readability depends on a typeface selection and typographic solutions.

When creating a wayfinding typeface, an equally important quality appears, legibility. The legibility is a quality of the glyphs themselves. It is important to what extent the glyphs are distinguishable from each other and can be read in different conditions.

Legibility is considered to be a part of readability. But since we are making a wayfinding typeface, the concept of legibility is important to us in the first place. So we study how legibility works in other typefaces.

Creators of the American road font Clearview write about the results of tests for the legibility of letters. The font was tested on road signs in different weather conditions and in different age groups. The Clearview road tests compared the Highway Gothic font used at the time.

Drivers speed and accuracy of reading has increased greatly with the proposed letter shapes and setting with caps and lowercase letters.

In her book ‘Design for Legibility’ Sophie Beier writes about the methods of legibility testing depending on the tasks: choice of a typeface, place of use, letter case. She continues to do research on legibility and describes the results in her lectures. Letter shape details research is particularly interesting. For example, the letters t and f are better recognizable when they have noticeable exit strokes because the eye is clinging to the most characteristic parts of the letter.

Typographer Nick Sherman and developer Chris Lewis have created a website that calculates the relationship between distance to an object, the physical size of the object, and its “perceived size”.

Nick Sherman says a person with good eyesight will see a letter 25 points high at a distance of 6 meters.

German typographer Ralf Hermann writes about how he created his Wayfinding Pro typeface, focusing primarily on the legibility tests. Guided by his tasks, he created a simple tester program that simulates the reading distance.

In parallel with the research of typeface legibility and navigation problems, we must define the aesthetic component, the character of the typeface. The aesthetics of typefaces is closely connected with the epoch, developing in parallel with technical progress. We decide to look to the future and think what typeface could look like for the next stage of human development⁠—space exploration.

We engage in cultural research, inspired by old and modern movies about space travel, Elon Musk, NASA, and Soviet developments. 

After studying other people’s approaches and research, we determine what characteristics exactly we want to see in our typeface in the first place.

Our typeface should have a big x‑height, open and rather dynamic shapes. The uppercase should not be too big relative to lowercase so that the word fits well in a given format. Letters in the typeface should be well read at a distance and be just as different from each other.

For example, the letter l (Latin lowercase L) should differ from I (Latin uppercase i), the Cyrillic letter б should differ from 6, and so on. Specific strokes in letters should be clearly distinguishable, for example, the top stroke of the letter f, bowl and tail of the letter a, the endings of the strokes in letters y and t.

We also think about the personality. The shapes should be a bit “technical” rather than soft and round, the details should convey machine sharpness and hardness. It is important not to move to the font Eurostyle popular in movies about space, but it’s OK to be a little inspired by it.

We try to draw the first sketches, keeping in mind the revealed characteristics.

So far, the shapes are just too soft. We need something sharper, harder, and more focused. Letters must be human, dynamic on the one hand, and technical, “robot‑like” on the other. Let’s draw more.

Next to more mechanical sketches we draw icons at the same time. The approach to icons should be the same as to the letter shapes.

We digitize the first letters with two approaches. In the first one we get personality out of specific bending of the strokes. In the second, the sharpness is formed in the inner corners. We try to test the shapes on wayfinding plates.

As part of the experiment, we try to add something similar to ink traps. In a small size they should not be visible, but in a large size they can complement the character.

We’re trying to develop a version with sharpened inner corners. In it, there is some of the broadnib pen logic left, so ink traps too can be useful. We make the spacing bigger and choose variants of some letters.

As part of the experiment, we make a variant where all inner angles will be sharp. After all, we will still have time to soften the shapes and make it not so display, in this iteration we are still looking for a character.

The experiment is funny, but the direction is wrong. It’s about time we calm down the variant we’ve been developing. We try to kill all the inner sharp angles, see if the right feeling is still there.

The general direction has been determined. The shape of the ink traps is not yet satisfactory, but we will return to them when we finish drawing the remaining letters of the two alphabets. At this stage it already makes sense to understand what weight will be in the light and bold styles. We make a quick sketch.

Working on the bold style, an idea of how to draw ink traps appears. We are not sure that they will be used everywhere necessary, so we begin to call them notches. We think of them as signature elements, which will be visible only in large sizes, and in small ones they will disappear. Due to these notches, there is a feeling that the strokes of the letters are three‑dimensional. We figure out that in this way we can imitate letters and icons — three‑dimensionality should be in icons as well.

We’re working with the arrow at the same time. The art director’s not happy with the softness of the arrow that’s there now.

Finalizing the alphabets.

The main problem now is the proportions. We’re fixing all the glyphs.

The next step: finalizing all the glyphs, checking the weights, adding other glyphs and kerning.

Parallel work — icons. First, we decide which icons should be in our font. Since we are making a wayfinding typeface, the art director wants to first draw transport icons from the classic AIGA set. We also understand that it would be cool to make “smart” icons, such as a ladder with an arrow that turns into a ligature. And, of course, we need several different sets of arrows, numbers, and specific bureau icons for the interface.

Not all icons can be drawn at once and easily.

To understand how light our light weight should be, we take existing examples from navigation, where light weight is used, and try our sketches there.

You can see that our light is quite heavy compared to the usual. We make the light even lighter.

Finalizing other glyphs.

Just like with the light one, let’s see if the bold weight came out bold enough on the first letters. Just like we planned, we make the cuts in the bold style the most visible.

Finalizing the other glyphs in the basic set.

Testing, understanding that we need to make the spacing looser.

We test in print, hang up the printed signs at different distances, simulate bad conditions with a Photoshop blur. We understand a terrible thing: at long distances letters stop being recognizable, the spacing is too tight. We have not solved the task of wayfinding! We save the current version and make the version with looser spacing.

The imitation of poor perception conditions shows how much more readable the text is with the looser spacing.

We test the typeface not only at home, but also on the bureau staff.

When creating a font, we look at different wayfinding tasks, in solving which the main three weights are often not enough. Often designers compromise, making a size smaller for one phrase, or choose a narrower style to fit in a limited format, or reduce the tracking.

For the designer to have more choice of styles, we plan to make narrow styles and then make everything interpolatable.

We’ve already got three main weights. These are called masters, and we can generate any intermediate weights between them.

Now we need to create masters in widths so that we can interpolate the font in two axes.

First we decide what’s the narrowest style that we want. First, we try to make Compressed, which would be the narrowest.

The art director does not want such narrow shapes and asks to make them wider, something closer to Condensed style.

Condensed one is okay, finishing the rest of the glyphs. For more consistency in the interpolation between normal and narrow outlines, we also set loose spacing.

We're finishing up the rest of the styles, which will be our masters.

For interpolation to produce the desired result, all six masters must be constructed in the same way. Each letter must have the same number of points, otherwise the interpolation will simply not work. All points must be placed correctly, otherwise the interpolation, even if it happens, will break the shapes.

We connect all the styles, create a so‑called “design space”. From this we can pull out as many instances as needed.

Naturally, any automation of the process requires checking, so we still check every style that we need for now.

To avoid confusion with the style names, we add a numeric designation. In our weight axis, the lightest style is 0 and the boldest is 1000. On the width axis the narrowest one is 0, and the regular one is 1000. So, if the style is closer to the light weight, but a bit bolder, it will be called Light 200. If it's a bit lighter than Bold and wider than Narrow, it will be called Condensed 200 Bold 900.