Baugenossenschaft Waidmatt asked architecture office Enzmann Fischer to develop a material and color concept for an ongoing building project. In turn, Enzmann Fischer asked Swiss design studio Onari Projects to design a matching lettering for internal and exterior signage.

The high-quality numerals, set in Maxeville by SM Foundry, were produced using an aluminum casting process and elegantly complement the coarse exterior plaster while making it easier to find the building entrances facing the courtyard.

Source: www.kyivtypefoundry.com Matvii Masliukov. License: All Rights Reserved.

Palats Sportu (Палац Спорту) is a station on Kyiv Metro’s “green line”, officially known as the Syretsko-Pecherska Line. It was designed by architect Mykola Alyoshkin and opened in 1989. The sign on the station wall comprises brass letters cast in Novohrad-Volynsky stating the name in Cyrillic capitals: “ПАЛАЦ СПОРТУ”. There is an image depicting an old version “ДВОРЕЦ СПОРТА” in Russian that was dismantled in the course of derussification. The authorship of these curios letterforms remained unknown for a long time, then attributed to the architect Alyoshkin himself, until Kyiv Type Foundry’s team found out the original (thanks to Florian Hardwig) during their Kyiv Metro Fonts project.

Matvii Masliukov. License: All Rights Reserved.

Detail of the letters “ПОР”

It’s typefaces called New York 30 and was made by Dutch designer Leo Meuffels for Mecanorma, a French competitor to Letraset, in 1984. It is likely that the Mecanorma catalog got into Alyoshkin’s hands. Alyoshkin says: “I don't remember where I saw these letters, perhaps it was a catalogue that circulated at the Metroprojekt. I wasn't happy about their size at the wall. They should have been bigger. Bronze was very expensive in the USSR.”

Matvii Masliukov. License: All Rights Reserved.

Further uses of the font are lesser known. One case can be found in the second volume of Yasaburo Kuwayama’s book International Logotypes from 1990, where “MEGAVIDEO” appears in the “dotted” logotype genre showcase as no. 2428.

Source: drive.google.com License: All Rights Reserved.

The discovery of the Megavideo logo in the second volume of Yasaburo Kuwayama’s book International Logotypes from 1990 suggested that the letterforms in the metro stations are not custom, but come from a typeface.

Philip Surey applies gold leaves onto the painted letters.

Inscriptions designed by John Morgan studio for The Order of St Augustine’s Church in Hammersmith, London, restored and refurbished by Roz Barr Architects (completed February 2018). This is the first application of the typeface Persona, released by Abyme in June 2022. Persona is a display sans serif based on Hans Möhring’s Florida (c. 1931) and inspired by Renaissance letterforms characteristic of the Florentine architecture, painting and sculpture of the fifteenth century.

Inscriptional text is set in a new cast iron light ring suspended above the altar, also designed by Roz Barr Architects, and gilded across the apse wall and below the Stations of the Cross by Philip Surey.

The inscription on the apse wall reads: Qui vult vivere, habet ubi vivat, habet unde vivat. Accedat, credat ut incorporetur, ut vivificetur (Those who long for life have here its very source. Let them come here and believe, unite with You and live).

Read more about the project at the Abyme Revue and at The Architect’s Journal.

The apse wall and cast iron light ring.

Gilded apse wall inscription.

Gilded apse wall inscription.

Cast iron light ring inscription.

Phil Surey painting the Stations of the Cross.

Sidewalk street name marker plaques, Market Street in San Francisco. These were likely installed in the very early 1970s, as part of the re-covering of Market Street following the construction of subways underneath it.

The all-caps lettering appears to use Chelmsford, a copy of Optima that’s distinguished by the stroke extension at the top of A. According to Mark Simonson, it was “produced by Addressograph-Multigraph (AM) in the seventies for their phototypesetting machines.”

Bordonaro Spur and Bordonaro Script in use for the branding of Legend Cookware’s Cast Iron series. The accompanying serif is Livory.

In a world gone disposable, Legend crafts high-performance, high-value cooking tools that beg to be used, loved, and used again. Get your hands on real, old-world kitchen gear that is at its best when put to the test. It’s all the inspiration you need to imagine, adopt, and create.

The Sklonar typeface was originally designed exclusively for Zdeněk Sklenář’s gallery at Prague’s Smetanovo nábřeží, as part of the corporate identity conceived by Studio Najbrt in 2011. The exhibiton space is simply called “S”. Two years later however, the gallery, including several works of art, was destroyed in a gas explosion. During the time of its use, the typeface appeared in promotional materials, in exhibitions, and also in artistic publications. But first and foremost, it excellently complemented the clean gallery space created by architect Josef Pleskot.

Calle del Cantón, 1, Santillana del Mar

AKA Bäckerei & Konditorei Thürmann. Previously called Konditorei Storch, the bakery has been at this location for at least 75 years. The other, newer signs are not so attractive.

Most of the UK’s social housing maps have flat, printed cartography labeled with Helvetica, Gill Sans, Futura, Rockwell, or Arial. But the Cuthbert Harrowing House in the architecturally significant Golden Lane Estate got a 3D map set in cast iron (or bronze?) and Grotesque No. 9. It appears that other public housing estates used this face as well. 

I don’t know who designed the map and sign, but the building’s architect was Geoffry Powell of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon.