About the project
Public transport supports the city keep running, mass people travelling every day. An efficient wayfinding system carried an important duty for effective and smooth flow.
This is a self-study of the wayfinding system in the MTR and KMB, the two largest mass transit in Hong Kong.
Year: 2018-2021
MTR Wayfinding System
The Mass Transit Railway (MTR) is one of the biggest public transport operators in the world, with millions of passengers every single day. Now operating 10 heavy rail lines with 93 stations, 12 light rail with 68 stations and bus service, cover 90% of the population in Hong Kong.
From the graphic above, some train lines' English name is long, the label width is not enough and needs to compress the fonts, the label looks very compact.
Case 3
The Coloured Train Line Label is a new design updated in 2019, However, I have observed several problems with this new change.
Case 3.1: Label width not enough for text
Some text alignment to the arrow pointing direction but some align to the centre.
Case 3.2: Inconsistent alignment
The East Rail Line and the South Island Line are using light blue and green, and it’s hard to read the white text on the light colour, even harder when the signage is a lightbox.
Case 3.3: Low colour contrast
The team has made the Sign System Manual, listed fonts usage, spacing, pictogram, layout and applications in detail. This wayfinding system also becomes a standard and reference for the nearby area railway system with Chinese and English bilinguals.
In view of this massive people flow in the railway facilities, an effective wayfinding system is particularly important for guiding the passengers to their destination. In MTR, the wayfinding system was established by Sammy Or and his team in 1979, the year that MTR opens.
The MTR Sung
No.1 MTR Sung and Helvetica is the font of the MTR wayfinding system in the earliest stage. They have improved the wayfinding design in 1998 for the keep growing metro system, and now using Dyna Sung as the Chinese font and Myriad as the English font.
Actually, MTR Sung is a blurry concept, it combined a few Sung fonts. From my observations, MTR is always mixing a few Sung fonts in the signage. The following examples show the MTR Sung font family.
No.1 & No.2 MTR Sung
The original MTR Sung was created in 1977, the year of MTR open. Based on the technology restrictions that time, the first version of MTR Sung was created by handwriting, the details of the fonts like stroke weight and spacing were adjusted by designers precisely.
The no.3 MTR Sung was based on the no.1 MTR Sung and slightly adjusted.
No.3 MTR Sung
Dyna Sung is the most common font in the system nowadays. Digitalised font and the large family is the most beneficial for the MTR which saves human power and money to create a full set of Chinese font.
Dyna Sung
MTR Sung Family
Layout & Compression
In the past few years, the information design of MTR is getting terrible based on the keep growing metro system with more and more information. In my opinion, I'm afraid the worst part is the layout and compression.
Case 1
This is a lightbox signage of a staircase in Admiralty station about guiding passengers to the other platform. In this case, you can see the layout has wasted the space on the right side and the space between the information are quite wide. The wastage of white space makes the font compressed and this affects the readability of the content.
Obviously, the space of the signage is good enough for all the information and no need to compress the fonts.
My suggestion:
This is a lightbox signage in Kowloon Tong station about guiding passengers interchange to East Rail Line.
In this case, you can see the layout is very compact, too much information in tiny signage, the words were compressed to fit into the lightbox and this made the low readability and affects the passengers to read the information.
Case 2
My suggestion:
I suggest enlarging the lightbox if needed to put all the information into one signage, otherwise, I think it can omit some information.
