A strange phenomenon across public mapping services is what could be called the "Arial syndrome".
Despite her widespread use in offices and businesses worldwide, "Arial" (who steps behind its elegant original "Helvetica") doesn't make too much sense on maps. I have only weak reason to believe this is a form-follows-function debate. There are better alternatives, meeting the demand of both small screens, mobile devices and large desktop displays.
As nicer and more appropriate cartographic fonts do exist and after reviewing our typographic short list, we finally decided to go with FF Transit:
The Transit is a quite pragmatic yet beautiful foundry, following the famous "Frutiger". She has been designed by Erik Spiekermann and his former company MetaDesign in 1990. The initial usecase was to have a unifying font for a unified mass transit authority after East and West Berlin became united into BVG (Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe). And as unifying is near to the "United" in both our company name and production philosophy, this seemingly was a good omen.
Transit is exceptionally good to read at even small sizes:
There are some other public transport authorities and the renewed Airport of Düsseldorf where FF Transit guides millions of travellers every day.
We'll post screenshots in addition to yesterdays' snaps including labelling using FF Transit shortly.
