Written by EMILY SNEDDON
Published on 6TH NOVEMBER 2025

Fran Sans is a display font in every sense of the term. It’s an interpretation of the destination displays found on some of the light rail vehicles that service the city of San Francisco.

SFMTA Photo Department

I say some because destination displays aren’t consistently used across the city’s transit system. In fact, SF has an unusually high number of independent public transit agencies. Unlike New York, Chicago or L.A., which each have one, maybe two, San Francisco and the greater Bay Area have over two dozen. Each agency, with its own models of buses and trains, use different destination displays, creating an eclectic patchwork of typography across the city.

Among them, one display in particular has always stood out to me: the LCD panel displays inside Muni’s Breda Light Rail Vehicles. I remember first noticing them on a Saturday in October on the N-Judah, heading to the Outer Sunset for a shrimp hoagie. This context is important, as anyone who’s spent an October weekend in SF knows this is the optimal vibe to really take in the beauty of the city.

What caught my eye was how the displays look mechanical and yet distinctly personal. Constructed on a 3×5 grid, the characters are made up of geometric modules: squares, quarter-circles, and angled forms. Combined, these modules create imperfect, almost primitive letterforms, revealing a utility and charm that feels distinctly like the San Francisco I’ve come to know.

This balance of utility and charm seems to show up everywhere in San Francisco and its history. The Golden Gate’s “International Orange” started as nothing more than a rust-proof primer, yet is now the city’s defining colour. The Painted Ladies became multicoloured icons after the 1960s Colourist movement covered decades of grey paint. Even the steepness of the streets was once an oversight in city planning but has since been romanticised in films and on postcards. So perhaps it is unsurprising that I would find this same utility and charm in a place as small and functional as a train sign.

To learn more about these displays, I visited the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SFMTA) Electronics Shop at Balboa Park. There, technician Armando Lumbad had set up one of the signs. They each feature one large LCD panel which displays the line name, and twenty-four smaller ones to display the destination. The loose spacing of the letters and fluorescent backlighting gives the sign a raw, analogue quality. Modern LED dot-matrix displays are far more efficient and flexible, but to me, they lack the awkwardness that makes these Breda signs so delightful.

Armando showed me how the signs work. He handed me a printed matrix table listing every line and destination, each paired with a three-digit code. On route, train operators punch the code into a control panel at the back of the display, and the LCD blocks light on specific segments of the grid to build each letter. I picked code 119, and Armando entered it for me. A few seconds later the panels revealed my own stop: the N-Judah at Church & Duboce. There in the workshop, devoid of the context of the trains and the commute, the display looked almost monolithic, or sculptural, and I have since fantasised whether it would be possible to ship one of these home to Australia.

Looking inside of the display, I found labels identifying the make and model. The signs were designed and manufactured by Trans-Lite, Inc., a company based in Milford, Connecticut that specialised in transport signage from 1959 until its acquisition by the Nordic firm Teknoware in 2012. After lots of amateur detective work, and with the help from an anonymous Reddit user in a Connecticut community group, I was connected with Gary Wallberg, Senior Engineer at Trans-Lite and the person responsible for the design of these very signs back in 1999.

Original drawings of the display, courtesy of William Maley Jnr, former owner and CEO of TRANS-LITE, INC.

Learning that the alphabet came from an engineer really explains its temperament and why I was drawn to it in the first place. The signs were designed for sufficiency: fixed segments, fixed grid, and no extras. Characters were created only as destinations required them, while other characters, like the Q, X, and much of the punctuation, were never programmed into the signs. In reducing everything to its bare essentials, somehow character emerged, and it’s what inspired me to design Fran Sans.

I shared some initial drawings with Dave Foster of Foster Type who encouraged me to get the font software Glyphs and turn it into my first working font. From there, I broke down the anatomy of the letters into modules, then used them like Lego to build out a full set: uppercase A–Z, numerals, core punctuation.

Some glyphs remain unsolved in this first version, for example the standard @ symbol refuses to squeeze politely into the 3×5 logic. Lowercase remains a question for the future, and would likely mean reconsidering the grid. But, as with the displays themselves, I am judging Fran Sans as sufficient for now.

Grid comparison. Left is a photo of the display, right is Fran Sans.

Getting up close to these signs, you’ll notice Fran Sans’ gridlines are simplified even from its real‑life muse, but my hope is that its character remains. Specifically: the N and the zero, where the unusually thick diagonals close in on the counters; and the Z and 7, whose diagonals can feel uncomfortably thin. I’ve also noticed the centre of the M can scale strangely and read like an H at small sizes, but in fairness, this type was never designed for the kind of technical detail so many monospaced fonts aim for. Throughout the process I tried to protect these unorthodox moments, because to me, they determined the success of this interpretation.

Fran Sans comes in three styles: Solid, Tile, and Panel, each building in visual complexity. The decision to include variations, particularly the Solid style, was inspired by my time working at Christopher Doyle & Co. There, we worked with Bell Shakespeare, Australia’s national theatre company dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. The equity of the Bell Shakespeare brand lies in its typography, which is a beautiful custom typeface called Hotspur, designed and produced by none other than Dave Foster.

Hotspur by DAVE FOSTER.

Often, brand fonts are chosen or designed to convey a single feeling. Maybe it’s warmth and friendliness, or a sense of tech and innovation. But what I’ve always loved about the Bell typeface is how one weight could serve both Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies, simply by shifting scale, spacing, or alignment. Hotspur has the gravity to carry the darkness of Titus Andronicus and the roundness to convey the humour of Much Ado About Nothing. And while Fran Sans Solid is technically no Hotspur, I wanted it to share that same versatility.

Bell Shakespeare by CHRISTOPHER DOYLE & CO.

Further inspiration for Fran Sans came from the Letterform Archive, the world’s leading typography archive, based in San Francisco. Librarian and archivist Kate Long Stellar thoughtfully curated a research visit filled with modular typography spanning most of the past century. On the table were two pieces that had a significant impact on Fran Sans and are now personal must-sees at the archive. First, Joan Trochut’s Tipo Veloz “Fast Type” (1942) was created during the Second World War when resources were scarce. Tipo Veloz gave printers the ability to draw with type, rearranging modular pieces to form letters, ornaments and even illustrations.

Second, Zuzana Licko’s process work for Lo-Res (1985), an Emigre typeface, opened new ways of thinking about how ideas move between the physical and the digital and then back again. Seeing how Lo-Res was documented through iterations and variations gave the typeface a depth and richness that changed my understanding of how fonts are built. At some point I want to explore physical applications for Fran Sans out of respect for its origins, since it is impossible to fully capture the display’s charm on screen.

Letterform Archive research visit, MAY 2025.

Back at the SFMTA, Armando told me the Breda vehicles are being replaced, and with them their destination displays will be swapped for newer LED dot-matrix units that are more efficient and easier to maintain. By the end of 2025 the signs that inspired Fran Sans will disappear from the city, taking with them a small but distinctive part of the city’s voice. That feels like a real loss. San Francisco is always reinventing itself, yet its charm lies in how much of its history still shows through. My hope is that Fran Sans can inspire a deeper appreciation for the imperfections that give our lives and our cities character. Life is so rich when ease and efficiency are not the measure.

For commercial and non-commercial use of FRAN SANS, please get in touch: emily@emilysneddon.com

WITH THANKS
Dave Foster, for being my go-to at every stage of this project.
Maria Doreuli, for thoughtfully reviewing Fran Sans.
Maddy Carrucan, for the words that always keep me dreamy.
Jeremy Menzies, for the photography of the Breda vehicles.
Kate Long Stellar, for curating a research visit on modular typography.
Angie Wang, for suggesting it and helping to make it happen.
Vasiliy Tsurkan, for inviting me into to the SFMTA workshop.
Armando Lumbad, for maintaining the signs that I love so much.
Rick Laubscher, for putting me in touch with the SFMTA.
William Maley Jr, for opening up the TRANS-LITE, INC. archives.
Gary Wallberg, for designing and engineering the original signs.
Gregory Wallberg, for responding to a very suspicious facebook post.
Reddit u/steve31086, for sleuthing the details of William Maley Jr.

OUTSIDE MY LIFE,
INSIDE THE DREAM.

FALLING UP THE STAIRS,
INTO THE STREET.

LET THE CABLE CAR
CARRY ME.

STRAIGHT OUT OF TOWN,
INTO THE SEA.

PAST THE DAHLIAS AND
THE SELF-DRIVING CARS.

THE CHURCH OF 8 WHEELS.
THE LOWER HAIGHT BARS.

THE PEAK HOUR SPRAWL.
THE KIDS IN THE PARK.

THE SLANTING HOUSES.
THE BAY AFTER DARK.

MY WINDOW, MY OWN
SILVER SCREEN.

I FOLLOW WHERE THE
FOG TAKES ME.

By MADDY CARRUCAN