While taking Dublin’s Light Rail Tram System, the LUAS, I was looking at the font of the LED information panels. There are a few on each tram; they are the only live information displays on the trams. The current system uses a 7 line high dot matrix but it seem as though sparse consideration was taken into account on the type selection. The problem is that the current typeface tries to incorporated upper and lower case letters, which means descenders. It is pointlessly complex, it impairs readability and does not lend itself well to this sort of display.
Too many letterforms are obscured from their expected form which only leads to poor legibility. For instance, the descender of the lowercase ‘g’ currently sits on the baseline but by keeping it uppercase it becomes far more familiar and instantly recognisable as the letter ‘G’. There is no logical room for descenders, it makes it very difficult to read. Bare in mind the text is nearly constantly moving, it needs to be neat, clear and large, passengers need to know when to get off. I have tried to improve legibility by giving the letters more presence, big counters and simple strong lines to compliment the simplicity of an LED display. There is no room for flimsy letterforms, they need to be bold and accurate. They need to be sure of what they stand for.
