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Right, in the words of Pablo
Medina, the creator of the
font Union Square, "Four
years ago I consciously
noticed for the first time the
mosaic typography used in
numerous stations in the
New York City subway sys¬
tem. The letterforms that I
was particularly drawn to
were the sans-serif mosaics.
The typeface is based on
squares which emulate
small, broken pieces of tile."
Below, crayon rubbing by the
author, 1982, of a serif-style
mosaic, also from the Union
Square subway station.

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ht, Tobias Frere-Jones worked from historic pho¬
tos of hand-lettered wall signs in New York City's
Grand Central Station to create the font Grand
Central Bold. He feels this style of lettering evolved
over several generations from roman inscriptional
lettering through the 1846 titling caps of Louis
Perrin to the с 1925 station signage, which Frere-
Jones affectionately describes as "willfully gawky."
Most of the historic, original signs around the sta¬
tion have been removed and "I'm still upset about
that," he says. [Font illustration by the author.]

ж uptown;!

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Top, an architect's sketches for a set of capitals used in sig¬
nage around the historic 1939 Los Angeles Union Station.
Architects, not being letterers, usually imbue their alpha¬
bets with a certain charming naivete that makes them
appear "gawky," as Frere-Jones noted. Several years ago, I
was commissioned to produce two fonts—a regular and a
bold—based on these sketches and to expand the alpha¬
bet to include a lowercase. Above, I created a faux mosaic
treatment to showcase the font, which I named Central
Station Regular. Every tile was hand-drawn and colored in
Illustrator before applying a Glass filter in Photoshop. Left,
another sample of the font. The train graphic is a dingbat,
and the background is a scan of an old book cover. In
keeping with my belief that enlarged caps, such as the Z
and D in LimiteD, should appear to have been drawn with
the same size "brush," I set the large caps in regular
weight and used the bold font for the smaller letters.

Left, Kolo, by Paul Shaw and
Garrett Böge, is based upon
the posters of Koloman
Moser, and other Vienna
Secession designers such as
Gustav Klimt and Josef
Maria Olbrich. "We changed
proportions and added
numbers, punctuation and
ligatures that did not
exist," says Shaw. "We
named the face after Moser
because we liked his nick¬
name." So the practice of
referencing older lettering is
hardly uncreative; more like
a challenging puzzle.