Topic:
Typographic Innovation for Matrix Displays
High-resolution, full-color screens dominate public spaces today, offering crisp images and a wide color palette. However, two-color matrix displays continue to be widely used, especially for information on trains, trams, and buses. Their good readability, high robustness, and low maintenance costs make them indispensable. However, there are only a few high-quality and freely available fonts for such applications and their visualization.
For this reason, I have developed the new font family Nose Transport, which is specifically designed for use on matrix displays. The family consists of three fonts with heights of 9, 13, and 16 pixels, measured by the capital letters. Each character is available in eight variants: Fine, Light, Regular, and Bold – each in round and square pixel form. This allows for flexible adaptation to various display requirements.
I am convinced that our new font, as an open-source project, can make the greatest contribution to improving the display of information in public spaces. Therefore, Nose has decided to make the new font freely accessible under the SIL Open Font License. The Nose Transport font family can be freely used and further developed on this basis. However, commercial resale is prohibited.
We do invite all railway companies to use the new font in their projects. It can be easily downloaded from GitHub. Feedback on practical applications is very welcome and will directly influence the further development of the font.
