page_title: Architecture of the Paris Métro
section_title: Signage and typography
hierarchical_section_title: Architecture of the Paris Métro / Signage and typography
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Station Place des Fêtes, de la ligne 11 du métro de Paris, France.
context_page_description: From the original plain white tilework and Art Nouveau entrances, the architecture of Paris Métro stations has evolved with successive waves of building and renovation.
  After experiments with diverse colour schemes, furniture and lighting, since 1999 there has been a reversion to the original design principles of the network. In parallel, the line 14 has provided an entirely new template for the stations of the 21st century.
context_section_description: When the first sections of the metro opened in the early 20th century, most station names in CMP stations were indicated by enameled signs hung from the ceiling and later mounted on the walls. The signs featured white, narrow, sans-serif uppercase letters set against a dark blue background. Despite the CMP's later decision to equip future stations with tiled nameplates, the enamel plaques in place survived well into the postwar period, with the last example, at La Motte-Picquet – Grenelle on line 6, only retired in 2006.
  Stations that were modernized in the carossage style of the 1950s and 1960s received new station signage. Breaking with the blue-and-white used for both tile and enamel nameplates until that time, the nameplates installed in carossage stations featured bright yellow, uppercase, sans-serif letters on a dark brown background, which proved to be more difficult to read from inside the trains.
  In the early 1970s, spurred on by the development of the RER system and by the opening of several new extensions to the network, the RATP undertook a program to harmonize the metro's corporate identity by replacing the many different fonts then in use with a unified, standard typeface. The font eventually chosen, "Métro Alphabet," was developed by the Swiss typeface designer Adrian Frutiger as a special, modified version of his Univers typeface. Installed throughout the network between 1973 and 1994, Métro Alphabet became the most widespread font used on the system and still remains in dozens of stations.
  By the early 1990s, the RATP had decided to update its signage, and selected a variant of the widespread Helvetica typeface, Neue Helvetica, for use in stations and on maps. The first métro typeface to employ upper and lower case letters, it was only used in a handful of stations, notably Place d'Italie on line 6, before the RATP changed course and commissioned French typeface designer Jean-François Porchez to create an exclusive font for the system. Porchez's font, called Parisine because it was initially used for the station signs, was first introduced in 1997. Since then, it has been adopted throughout the system and has increasingly replaced the remaining Frutiger signage.
caption: In the 1970s and 1980s, Adrien Frutiger's font Métro Alphabet, a specially drawn version of his Univers font for the metro, became nearly ubiquitous.
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