A Typeface Designed to Be Read in the Rain

The brief was unglamorous: passengers were missing platform changes at a coastal station because the signs became illegible in driving rain. The solution turned out to be a typeface.

The problem with thin strokes

Water on a sign surface does two things. It scatters light, lowering contrast, and it pools in the counters — the enclosed spaces inside letters like 'a' and 'e'. A face with delicate strokes and small counters loses both its contrast and its letterforms at once, and reduces to grey mush at forty metres.

We stopped designing for the studio and started designing for the worst ten minutes of the year.

Designing for the worst case

The resulting face is not beautiful in a specimen book. The counters are exaggerated to the point of looking clumsy at text sizes, the strokes are heavier than taste would suggest, and the terminals are cut at angles that shed water rather than hold it. At forty metres in a downpour, it is the only thing on the platform you can read.

It is a useful reminder that legibility is not a property of a typeface. It is a property of a typeface in a place, at a distance, in weather.