Seibu Railway, which runs through in northwest Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture, started new signange systems to change its sign boards using AXIS font as a main font.

The brilliant blue color of the sign board looks good and very striking, but I don’t know whether the commuters have been aware of this change or not. When I saw the new design sign board at Nerima-Takanodai station of the Ikebukulo line, which is near my office, I couldn’t see at a glance it was AXIS font because I didn’t have enough skills to find out the difference of Kanji characters among Japanese Fonts. However, I could tell the Hiragana “た” as I knew the characteristic Kana forms of AXIS.

The weight variation is only R (Regular) style and Latin parts are Helvetica. The route map on the sign bord is also the same. The old sign boards seem to be replaced by the new design, which is in progress now.

AFAIK, this is the second case AXIS is in use for a railway signage. The first one is Hisatsu Orange Railway in Kumamoto and Kagoshima pref., which started new sign boards that were designed by an architect Yasuyuki Kawanishi in 2004.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 4:59 pm and is filed under In use. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.