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How Metro Agencies Design the Letter 'M'

64 points| quakeguy | 4 years ago |bloomberg.com

42 comments

order
[+] aluminum96|4 years ago|reply
I'm surprised they didn't include the SF Muni logo -- it has a really weird, almost unrecognizable M. Very distinctive.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Mu...

[+] rosetremiere|4 years ago|reply
I'm distressed by the fact that the i is full instead of "double-stroked".
[+] eipipuz|4 years ago|reply
They ruled out logos where the M is not the main element. The Muni logo spells "muni" giving each letter roughly equal value.
[+] ljm|4 years ago|reply
The interesting question isn't 'how', it's why.

E.g. one of the 'metro's in the UK is a tram system in Manchester. And the one thing people might call a 'metro', when compared to other cities and countries is the London Underground, which everyone including the government[1] calls The Tube. And that's just a red ring with a blue line through it.

The more I think about it, the more bizarre it makes us Brits sound. Tubes, choobs, toobays...

[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/tube/

[+] ldjb|4 years ago|reply
The London Underground is the world's oldest underground railway. The very first line to be built was the Metropolitan Railway (now called the Metropolitan line), which opened in 1863.

So in a sense, you could say London was the first city to name their underground railway after the term "metropolitan".

[+] sverhagen|4 years ago|reply
In Dutch, "metro" refers to the underground, the subway. In the US it's the multi-modal metropolitan passenger transport system of a city or a region.
[+] tcmb|4 years ago|reply
Germans don't get to play because here it's called U-Bahn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_transit_in_Germany#/medi...
[+] LargoLasskhyfv|4 years ago|reply
Depends. Around here it's the Hochbahn. Wuppertal has the Schwebebahn, and a long time ago the Köln-Bonner Eisenbahn had the Silberpfeil racing along the Rheinuferbahn.
[+] turnerc|4 years ago|reply
Some of the agencies here don't fit the problem of 'M' meaning 'Metro', for example the last logo (Row 7) is described as Liverpool's metro system. It is not a metro system but a full train operating company and the 'M' is for Merseyrail
[+] Reason077|4 years ago|reply
> ”The universal symbol for a city’s Metro system is a big “M.”

Not in London. Or Toronto. Or Hong Kong. Or New York. Or…

[+] unmole|4 years ago|reply
Or Singapore. Or any of the thirteen metro rail systems in India.
[+] mseepgood|4 years ago|reply
The letter M comes from the Egyptian "water ripple" hieroglyph: 𓈖 I wonder what it thinks of its descendants.
[+] sebazzz|4 years ago|reply
Row two "Amsterdam" is also Rotterdam, although a different organization manages the metro's (RET instead of GVB).
[+] DavidSJ|4 years ago|reply
The Bucharest Metro logo looks like the Wonder Woman emblem.
[+] iggldiggl|4 years ago|reply
Now you mention it, yes it does a little… That's the company logo, though – station entrances use a simple blue sans-serif M.
[+] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
A made-up problem, clearly requiring enormous resources to solve.
[+] scoopertrooper|4 years ago|reply
Creating a distinctive symbol to represent an entity to the general public is a made up problem?

What's the alternative? Have a paragraph of text on every sign? Perhaps: "This cavity provides access to a subterranean network of locomotives that provide a means to traverse the city"

[+] riffic|4 years ago|reply
you know it'd be nice if these agencies stopped trying to be cute or original, and would just use some agreed upon standard design.
[+] rozab|4 years ago|reply
The metro system tends to be a source of pride for cities and their inhabitants, and I think there's room for a bit of diversity in this regard. I love the classy humanist typography and colours of the London Underground, but they certainly wouldn't fit the dinky Glasgow Subway.

And Glasgow can leverage graphic design in other interesting ways. The logo of the subway consists of a grey inner circle and an orange outer circle, representing the two lines which always run anti-clockwise and clockwise respectively. This colour scheme is used everywhere on the subway, so you always know which platform your train is at.