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Museum Station

Though it's the top half of the word that the eye skims in order to read something.

OK, you can stop repeating this urban myth. Word-superiority effect is the dominant hypothesis in psychology of reading and there is no experimental evidence whatsoever that we spend all day selectively attending to half the letters we read.
 
In fact, the TTC has a long history of making many of their stations distinctive, by either remaking old ones or when they add new ones. Change, as you have pointed out in so many other contexts, is what urbanity is all about. Why should the subway be any different?


Because the Bloor-Danforth subway has a different typology from the Yonge-University-Spadina, Sheppard, and Scarborough subways.
 
Helvetica font is common to all stations. Only Downsview deviates from this by the usage of sentence case over TITLE CASE for it's name signs. Nice that Museum at least retains this trend in a system increasingly consisting of dissimilar stations (tacky fuschia stripes all over the Sheppard line even on entrance signs, for instance, that makes one yearn for the simplistic elegance of a white 'subway' sign with an iconic red rocket or red banner with simple bold white lettering).
 
Helvetica font is common to all stations. Only Downsview deviates from this by the usage of sentence case over TITLE CASE for it's name signs. Nice that Museum at least retains this trend in a system increasingly consisting of dissimilar stations (tacky fuschia stripes all over the Sheppard line even on entrance signs, for instance, that makes one yearn for the simplistic elegance of a white 'subway' sign with an iconic red rocket or red banner with simple bold white lettering).

It's the line's colour, so it's on the entrance sign. Isn't it too late to question this now? The stripe at track level is that line's trademark since there are no tiles on the wall beside the tracks. That is elegant and simple, even if the colour isn't. Actually, there's a bit of irony in that.
 
joeclark: The point that I was making to CDL.TO, when he indicated that he could sometimes only see the top half of the single word naming the subway station when he was looking out the window opposite him, is that looking at only the top half of a word generally reveals the meaning of that word easier than looking at only the bottom half. The test I gave explains that. The word-superiority effect doesn't negate the fact that if you draw a horizontal line along the mid-point of the x-height of a word or sentence that uses upper and lower case letters the meaning of the word or sentence is revealed more easily by looking at the upper portion, including ascenders. When fate has selectively determined for you which part of a word you can see, as in the single-word ( station name ) case we were discussing, the design of the letters comes into play as a way of revealing their meaning - though, admittedly, this works better with upper-and-lower-case examples, whereas all the station names are actually in caps.
 
Wulod we gvie tehm the smae psas if teyh'd jmlbeud up the oderr of the ltetres?

They probably weren't thinking x-heights and brain tricks when they were positioning the station name, though given the outcome I have no idea what was actually going through their heads. Anyway, I wish they'd bothered to get it right.
 
It's the line's colour, so it's on the entrance sign. Isn't it too late to question this now? The stripe at track level is that line's trademark since there are no tiles on the wall beside the tracks. That is elegant and simple, even if the colour isn't. Actually, there's a bit of irony in that.

A discussion of the Sheppard line's colour followed this. It has now been moved into it's own thread, here.

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Tile Over Substance

2008_1_16Spadin.jpg
 
One is tempted to change which sybil one places the emphasis on without that A at the end, and the I has gone short now too. I suppose "SPADIN" is pronounced "Walmer", actually.

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