Two languages, one sign
How we drew a signage typeface for Halden Rail where Norwegian and Swedish set at the same width, and why that mattered more than the logo.
- Mireille Okafor
- 2 min
When Halden Rail asked us for a new identity, the brief was about a logo. The problem was a platform.
At the border station, a passenger changing trains reads Norwegian signs on one side of the concourse and Swedish signs on the other. The words are close. The layouts were not. The same instruction took a different amount of space in each language, so every sign pair had been designed as a special case, and nothing lined up.
Start with the longest word
We collected every string that appears on a platform sign in both languages: 1,140 of them. Then we sorted by length and set the longest pairs first. If Avgangsinformasjon and Avgångsinformation could sit on the same line at the same size, everything shorter would too.
That test shaped the typeface more than any sketch. The regular width ended up a little narrower than we would have drawn for looks alone, and the diacritics sit lower so that å, ø and ä do not push the line height.
One rule per sign
The typeface fixed the width. A rule fixed the order. Every platform sign now reads in the same sequence:
- Direction
- Destination
- Time
Nothing else is allowed on a platform sign. Service notices, adverts and safety messages have their own formats and their own places. It sounds obvious. It removed around a third of the signs in the network.
The best wayfinding decisions are the ones that let you remove a sign.
What we would do again
- Test with the real strings. A pangram tells you nothing about a station name.
- Design the rule before the layout. The order of information did more for legibility than the letterforms.
- Put motion in the guidelines. Departure boards, the app and in-train screens now animate a delay the same way, so a passenger sees one event, not three.
The full project is in the Halden Rail case study.
