Fran Sans Essay — Emily Sneddon

Fran Sans is a display font in every sense of the word. This is an explanation of the destination displays found on some light rail vehicles serving the city of San Francisco.

I say Some? Because destination displays are not used consistently in the city’s transit system. In fact, the number of independent public transit agencies in SF is unusually high. Unlike New York, Chicago or LA, where each has one, maybe two, San Francisco and the Greater Bay Area have more than two dozen. Each agency, with its own models of buses and trains, uses different destination displays, creating an eclectic patchwork of typography across the city.

Among them, one display in particular has always stood out to me: the LCD panel displays inside Muni’s Breda Light Rail vehicles. I remember the first time I saw them on a Saturday in October heading out to the sunset for lobster at N-Judah. This context is important, as anyone who has spent an October weekend in SF knows that this is the optimal environment to really see the beauty of the city.

What caught my attention was how mechanical and yet distinctly personal the displays looked. Built on a 3×5 grid, the characters are made up of geometric modules: squares, quarter-circles and angular forms. Combined, these modules create imperfect, almost primitive letterforms, revealing a utility and charm that feels distinctly like the San Francisco I know.

This balance of utility and charm is visible everywhere in San Francisco and its history. The Golden Gate’s “International Orange” started as nothing more than an anti-rust primer, yet it is now the city’s defining color. The Painted Ladies became a multicolored symbol after decades of being covered in gray paint by the Colorist movement of the 1960s. Even the steepness of the streets was once an omission in city planning, but has since been romanticized in films and postcards. So perhaps it’s not surprising that I would find the same utility and charm in a small and functional space like a train sign.

To learn more about these displays, I visited the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) electronics shop in Balboa Park. There, technician Armando Lumbad had installed a sign. They each have a large LCD panel that displays the name of the line, and twenty-four smaller panels to display the destination. The loose spacing of letters and fluorescent backlighting give the sign a raw, analog quality. Modern LED dot-matrix displays are far more efficient and flexible, but for me, they lack the quirkiness that makes these Breda signs so enjoyable.

Armando showed me how the signs work. He gave me a printed matrix table that listed every line and destination, each associated with a three-digit code. En route, train operators punch the code into a control panel behind the display, and the LCD blocks light on specific sections of the grid to form each letter. I chose code 119 and Armando entered it for me. A few seconds later the panel revealed my own stop: Church and N-Judah in Dubose. There in the workshop, devoid of the context of trains and transit, the display looked almost monolithic, or sculptural, and I have since imagined whether it would be possible to send one of these home to Australia.

Looking inside the display, I found labels identifying the make and model. The signals were manufactured by Trans-Lite, Inc., a company based in Milford, Connecticut. It was designed and manufactured by Technoware, a company that specialized in transport signage from 1959 until its acquisition by the Nordic firm Technoware in 2012. After a lot of amateur detective work, and with the help of an anonymous Reddit user in a Connecticut community group, I connected with Gary Walberg, senior engineer at Trans-Lite and the man responsible for the design of these signs in 1999.

Learning that Alphabet came from an engineer really clarified its nature and why I was attracted to it in the first place. Signs were designed for sufficiency: fixed segments, fixed grid, and no extras. Characters were created only when needed for destinations, while other characters, such as Q, X and most punctuation marks, were never programmed into signs. In reducing everything to its bare minimum, somehow character emerged and this inspired me to design Fran Sans.

I shared some early drawings with Dave Foster of Foster Type who encouraged me to get the font software glyph and turn it into my first working font. From there, I broke the anatomy of the letters into modules, then used them to build a complete set like Lego: uppercase A-Z, digits, main punctuation marks.

Some glyphs remain unresolved in this first version, for example the standard @ symbol politely refuses to be squeezed into a 3×5 argument. Lowercase remains a question for the future, and will likely mean rethinking the grid. But, in terms of display, I’m considering the Fran Sans as adequate for now.

Looking closer to these signs, you’ll notice that Fran Sans’s gridlines have become even simpler than their real-life counterparts, but my hope is that the character will remain. In particular: n and zero, where unusually thick diagonals are closed on counters; and the Z and 7, whose diagonals can feel uncomfortably thin. I’ve also noticed that the center of the M can scale weirdly and read like an H at smaller sizes, but in fairness, the type was never designed for the kind of technical detail that many monospaced fonts aim for. Throughout the process I tried to protect these unconventional moments, because for me, they determined the success of this interpretation.

Fran Sans comes in three styles: solid, tile and panel, each building in visual complexity. The decision to include variations, specifically the Solid style, was inspired by my time working at Christopher Doyle & Company. There, we worked with Bell Shakespeare, Australia’s national theater company dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. The equity of the Bell Shakespeare brand lies in its typography, a beautiful custom typeface called Hotspur, designed and created by none other than Dave Foster.

Often, brand fonts are chosen or designed to convey a single emotion. Perhaps it’s the warmth and friendliness, or the sense of technology and innovation. But what I’ve always loved about the Bell typeface is how one weight can represent both Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies, simply by changing the scale, spacing or alignment. Hotspur has the seriousness to carry the darkness with him Titus Andronicus and roundness to express humor much Ado About NothingAnd while the Fran Sans Solid isn’t technically a Hotspur, I wanted it to share the same versatility,

Further inspiration for Fran Sans came from the Letterform Archive, the world’s leading typography archive located in San Francisco. Librarian and archivist Kate Long Steller thoughtfully organized a research trip filled with modular typography throughout the last century. On the table were two pieces that had a significant influence on Fran Sens and are now must-sees in person in the collection. First, Joan Trochat’s tipo veloz “Fast Type” (1942) was created during World War II when resources were scarce. tipo veloz Printers were given the ability to create letters, ornaments, and even images by rearranging modular pieces according to type.

Second, work for Zuzana Lico’s process low-res (1985), an émigré typeface, opened up new ways of thinking about how ideas move between the physical and the digital and back again. see how low-res Documented through iterations and variations, the typefaces gained depth and richness that changed my understanding of how fonts are created. At some point I’d like to explore physical applications of Fran Sens in honor of his original, as it’s impossible to fully capture the charm of a display on a screen.

Back at the SFMTA, Armando told me that the Breda vehicles are being replaced, and with them their destination displays will be swapped out for new LED dot-matrix units that are more efficient and easier to maintain. By the end of 2025 the signs that inspired Fran Sans will disappear from the city, taking with them a small but distinctive part of the city’s sound. It feels like a real loss. San Francisco is always reinventing itself, yet its charm lies in how much of its history still lingers. My hope is that Fran Sans can inspire a deeper appreciation for the imperfections that give character to our lives and our cities. Life is much richer when ease and efficiency are not the measure.

For commercial and non-commercial use of FRAN SANS, please contact: emily@emilysneddon.com

With thanks
Dave Foster, for being my partner at every step of this project.
Maria Doreulli, for her thoughtful review of Fran Sans.
Maddie Carrucan, for the words that always keep me dreaming.
Jeremy Menzies, Breda for the photography of the vehicles.
Kate Long Stellar, for organizing a research trip on modular typography.
Angie Wang, for suggesting it and helping to make it happen.
Vasily Tsurkan for inviting me to the SFMTA workshop.
Armando Lumbad, for maintaining the signs that I love so much.
Rick Laubscher for putting me in touch with SFMTA.
William Maley Jr., Trans-Lite, Inc. To open the archives.
Gary Walberg, for designing and engineering the original signs.
Gregory Wahlberg, for responding to a highly questionable Facebook post.
Reddit u/steve31086 to find out the details of William Maley Jr.

outside my life,
Inside the dream.

fall down the stairs,
On the road.

let’s go cable car
take me

straight out of town,
In the ocean.

behind the dahlias and
Self-driving cars.

Church of 8 Wheels.
Lower height bars.

Peak time spread.
Children in the park.

Diagonal house.
The Bay After Dark.

my window, my own
silver screen.

i follow there
The fog takes me.

By Maddie Carrucan