Paris 🇫🇷

Parisine is the official typeface for the Paris subway system (it is used in the Paris Métro, tramways, buses and RER parts operated by the RATP Group in Île-de-France) since 2015. It was designed in late 1996 by Jean-François Porchez, and ever since then it has seen its own super family grow quite rapidly.

But Paris, much like Berlin as we’ll soon see, is also a wonderful reflection of the city’s complex and rich design history and historical background, and you’ll still see plenty of typefaces and design variations around it. As you’d expect, Paris is… delicately complicated.

Parisine at Saint-Michel station. Photo by Chris Sampson

If you’ve spent a good amount of time in Paris, maybe you’ll remember seeing a different style of subway signage, with white uppercase names on a dark blue background. This is/was the Métro Alphabet, and it goes back to the 70’s when the first RER lines were being constructed and more care was needed to be given to signage. At the time, Univers was the default typeface being used, but RATP commissioned Adrian Frutiger to redraw it for the Métro. The result was the signage that can still be found all over the subway, like the one below at Place Des Fêtes:

The Métro Alphabet. Photo by Clicsouris (Wikipedia Commons)

The construction of the first RER lines in the 1970s meant more thought was given to signage. The colours of station signage on the RER reverted to white text on a blue background, using Univers as the typeface. But RATP wasn’t completely satisfied with the RER signage, and asked Univers designer Adrian Frutiger to draw a special version for the Métro. He did, though it was decided to use Métro Alphabet only to replace damaged signage, or signage which carried out-of-date information. This distinctive all-caps signage can still be found all over the Métro.

Parisine was specifically designed to be better than Helvetica as far as legibility goes. Compared to it, it has numerals which are more readable and very strong terminals, as well as a more condensed feel to it.

Given that Paris has some long station names, this was certainly an intentional design characteristic, too. See below how it compares to Helvetica.

There is one detail I’ve found Parisine not to excel at, and that is the distinction between the numeral zero (0) and the lowercase o (o).

As an example, the last character in these inputs (the one highlighted in the image below) is the lowercase letter “o”, next to the zero. Notice how it’s virtually impossible to distinguish them.

The 0 numeral is too similar to the lowercase o (last two characters)

Parisine is also available from TypeKit, and by now it has grown up to 16 different styles and weights.

A conversation about Paris wouldn’t be complete without talking about the iconic Metropolitan signs, which are certainly part of the charm of the Paris metro… but for brevity’s sake, I’ll just leave this great article by Paris Step for now… to be followed up on a second part!

In the meantime, The Beauty of Transport has a great article with plenty of information about it, if you want to know more. But for now, let’s move to Germany.