How Metro Agencies Design the Letter 'M'

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.

b3orn• 5 years ago

I'm only aware of one "Hochbahn" and that's just the name of the company operating the U-Bahn.

4cao• 5 years ago

Direct link to the source (large images, sorted by similarity): http://mic-ro.com/metro/metrologos.html?size=lg&sort=similar...

turnerc• 5 years ago

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

mseepgood• 5 years ago

The letter M comes from the Egyptian "water ripple" hieroglyph: 𓈖 I wonder what it thinks of its descendants.

riffic2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

motoxpro• 5 years ago

Really really great answer.

riffic2• 5 years ago

adding to this because someone else brought up ISO 7001:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7001

WalterBright• 5 years ago

A made-up problem, clearly requiring enormous resources to solve.

scoopertrooper• 5 years ago

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"

SPBS• 5 years ago

Maybe not the symbol, but the article artificially constraining itself to 'M' seems a bit suspect to me. In my country the symbol for the metro isn't even M [1]

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Singapor...

joppy• 5 years ago

Trying to stylise the letter M to be distinctive is pretty circuitous - just use an icon of a train! You remove the problem almost entirely, and get a symbol which is easily recognisable even to people who don’t speak the local language.

In Sydney, in the last 10 years our icons have been replaced by stylised letters. T stands for train (not Taxi or Tram), except when it doesn’t and M stands for Metro (which everyone still just calls the train), L stands for light rail (which everyone calls Trams)… it was so much more clear when there were just icons.

snthd• 5 years ago

What's the alternative?

Use the ISO 7001 symbols. https://iss.isolutions.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:pub:PUB400006:en

Personally I think they're ugly. Not always more ugly than a given 'M' though.

ljm• 5 years ago

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/

ldjb2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

DavidSJ• 5 years ago

The Bucharest Metro logo looks like the Wonder Woman emblem.

iggldiggl• 5 years ago

Now you mention it, yes it does a little… That's the company logo, though – station entrances use a simple blue sans-serif M.

sebazzz• 5 years ago

Row two "Amsterdam" is also Rotterdam, although a different organization manages the metro's (RET instead of GVB).

Reason077• 5 years ago

”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…

88840-8855• 5 years ago

or Germany

unmole• 5 years ago

Or Singapore. Or any of the thirteen metro rail systems in India.

ChrisArchitect2• 5 years ago

(2015)!

ChrisArchitect2• 5 years ago

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10626577

How Metro Agencies Design the Letter 'M'

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