Jean François Porchez is one of the key figures in contemporary French type design. Having been dubbed the ‘new Adrian Frutiger’ already quite early in his career, he came into his own halfway the nineties. I originally met him at the ATypI Conference in Antwerp in 1993, where he already had a solid reputation, having won twice the Morisawa International Type Design Award with FF Angie and Apolline, respectively in 1990 and 1993. He eventually became the President of ATypI from 2004 to 2007.

After having designed typefaces for newspapers – specifically for small point sizes – creating a typeface for signage, for a medium other than paper, seemed like an interesting challenge for Jean François Porchez. When designing for small sizes, for poor quality of paper and printing, specific parts and shapes need to be emphasized which often results in idiosyncratic letterforms. Conversely a signage typeface requires a certain simplicity in its shapes, and characters should be balanced, clean and quite minimalistic. Whereas Renaissance book faces remain the archetype for most text faces for print, in a historical context the purity of Greek and Roman inscriptions with their open counters and generous proportions are more suitable for signage.

In the early seventies, Adrian Frutiger was asked to design a special version of Univers for setting place names in metro stations. His recommendation was to use all capitals setting to match the existing signage. Several years later, the RATP started developing a new concept for the signage system. It was decided to switch to mixed setting (caps and lowercase) as this dramatically improves legibility.

A single type family was needed for this new signage project which was to be applied to all the transportation systems in the French capital. After several proposals had been rejected – including one by Frutiger – the creative team was asked to select one amongst the type families already in use by the RATP: Métro, the Adrian Frutiger all caps face based on Univers; RER, Albert Boton’s thin rounded all caps face designed specifically for the new fast Métro in the seventies; Gill Sans, used in recent years for official communication; and Neue Helvetica, used for the bus signage system.

Not surprisingly around 1995 Neue Helvetica was selected, as it was commonly available and compatible with various computer platforms. This perceived advantage ultimately proved its undoing. As most users never understood the subtle differences between the different versions of Helvetica, often Helvetica was mistakenly used instead of Neue Helvetica. And because of the large number of the widths and weights, the corporate guidelines were never successfully implemented.

Italics are mainly used for for translations and tourist information. They are more condensed, more cursive and lighter. As the simple slanted form is too similar to the roman, a humanistic italic was chosen.