City Street Type (CST)
A digital interpretation of the lettering style that was introduced on Berlin’s street signs before the city was separated, and continued in the Western part. Originally issued as FF City Street West. (2000)
In collaboration with Ole Schäfer (*1970; †2024).
BACKSTORY
Until 1905, there was no system at all for the design or adjustment of street signs. Even the writing of the street names was not standardized and lots of complaints about this situation appeared in the newspapers.
(Still, Berlin is one city that has no clear system for the numbering of houses. It drives visitors crazy!)
Most of the historic street signs were just painted metal plates with white letters on blue background, fixed directly on the corner houses. This location was not very visible for drivers from the streets. Between 1905 and 1908 the decision was made to adapt new street signs in a better position on candelabras or streetlamps right at the edges of the pavement, close to the streets.
Together with this innovation, a new design with black letters on white background was established. A very narrow monolinear typeface, the Schmale Egyptienne, was used for the lettering.
BERLIN WEST
The history of the Berlin West street sign typeface actually starts in the 1930s, as it was used for the whole city, the former “Greater Berlin”.
In the 1920s sans serif typefaces became more and more round and provided a big advance in legibility over the narrow slab serif designs. The new shapes had obvious differences between round and straight forms, like the old Antiquas, but with a modern look. From the 1930s on, new street signs, made of weather resistant enamel, were produced to replace the old ones and give the gloomy city a contemporary appearance. For the typeface, a variation of Erbar Grotesk (Jakob Erbar, 1926) was used. The most distinctive and concise letter in this typeface isthe “ß”, that has its origin clearly in the ligature of thetwo different “s”, taken from the old blackletter shapes.This typeface also provides a “k” ligature. The “y” is another special. It looks like a capital taken as lowercase. As it is not meant to be used for texts, it works fine as used for display.
BERLIN EAST
From 1949 until the early 1950s the Soviet zone still produced enamel signs to replace temporary signs. A huge number of new signs was also needed for renaming streets, when the GDR started to indulge in astrong kind of hero worship. For example: In 1950 Danziger Straße was renamed Dimitroffstraße (after the reunification, the street wasrenamed Danziger Straße again). But shortly after WWII the GDR ran out of resources. In the economy of scarcity, a new way for the productonof streetsigns had do be found. Probably around 1950, new signs with a more industrial look were invented. The sign itself was made of plastic: a sandwich with a white shell and ablack core. The letters was drilled in by a mill cutter. This is the reason for its technical design: a typical engineer’s constructed alphabet along the lines of DIN Engschrift. There are two versions of the original typeface: In one, only one head for the mill-cut was used, the other one was done with two heads beside each other. The result are two kind of ends to the letters. One round, the other straight. The fact that it is so much narrower than the Western face may have to do with the street names themselves: celebrating Communist heroes, with first and surnames plus the appendix “Straße“ or “Platz”, they made very long street names.
While the newest street signs are more or less standardized, the original signs showed an almost infinite number of variants of both alphabets—marked differences in both letter-spacing and character width. From many variants, the designers distilled the three typefaces which they labelled as ”original’: Berlin East Original, Berlin East Rounded and Berlin West Original. Many glyphs were newly designed by Verena and Ole. In order to make City Street Type (CST) into more than a novelty font, we designed a series of smoother, reader-friendly variants of both alphabets, creating two balanced sub-families of three weights—Regular, Medium and Bold.