The New York subway uses Helvetica in almost all of its signs. But an odd thing pops up on some of the “Do not lean on door” signs. I can’t find anything online about it other than one livejournal mention of the anomaly with no conclusion.  Basically the “o”s seem to be turned and “n” gets a bit of a chop and one the letters don’t all seem to be on the same baseline. I’ve been noticing it for the past few months and been trying to figure out why these signs are so weird. It’s wide spread and standardized throughout the signs so it’s not an instance of one being mutilated or vandalized. Any ideas? If your interested in a detailed write up on the MTA and their typography check it out on the AIGA website.

photo from http://agrumer.livejournal.com/470224.html

so I was thinking about fonts and white space and decided to create a font made up of the whitespace that normally borders letters. and in the spirit of this background and/or shadow of a normal font I thought it would be interesting to experiment with cutting off certain letters early making the font seem more haphazard like shadows from a tree blowing around in the wind. I used a slab serif template of sorts to further define the letter form. This font only includes caps. The name is “la sombra” or the shade in spanish. Download: la sombra.