i think about the matrix at least once every twenty minutes.

Live in the

mollusk

When most people encounter a San Francisco streetcar, they see their commute to work or a ride home.

Emily Sneddon saw poetic beauty. More specifically, the designer fell for the Dijon-colored destination display on Muni’s recently retired Breda trains. She calls the typeface “raw and functional and mechanical,” then in the next breath describes the lettering like it’s a Michelangelo fresco.

“And yet there are curves,” she says, “and a unique counter thickness, that make you think, ‘A human hand has definitely touched this.’”

This passion sent the 31-year-old Australia native on a journey, first to a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency maintenance yard, then to find the lettering’s original designer. Her quest ended with a new Muni-inspired font, which she called Fran Sans and describes as a thank you note to San Francisco.

“I saw how genuinely people within San Francisco wanted to know about this piece of history, no matter how small it is,” Sneddon says. “I started to realize, this could almost be a gift back to the city for my time here.”

When the Italian Breda streetcar prototype was first unveiled in the Chronicle on Feb. 15, 1995, there was no mention of the lettering, which was set on backlit liquid crystal displays. The breaking news was the silver, red and gray color scheme — replacing Muni’s malfunctioning orange vehicles — and the cost.

“At $2 million per car, the vehicles are among the most expensive streetcars ever built,” the Chronicle reported.

Those Breda cars were near the end of their life in 2021 when Sneddon joined the Collins design firm in downtown San Francisco. They were replaced by hundreds of Siemens cars with less unique dot-matrix destination displays in a $1.2 billion overhaul. (The last Breda train ended service this year on Nov. 12.)

Sneddon, who had no car, took the N-Judah and J-Church streetcars from her Duboce Park home to work and to explore the Sunset District on weekends.

During these trips she was drawn to the lettering, built in geometric grids on 7-inch-high blocks, with chunky letters with swooping curves that looked like the typeface in an early 1980s arcade game.

“They have this warm yellow glow that feels like it has an analog quality, even though it’s not,” she said. “They’re only 26 years old, but feel like they came from a different time and place.”

Sneddon decided to start researching to create a Muni-themed font.

She arranged a visit to the SFMTA electronics shop at Balboa Park, where technicians showed her the LCD panels that display the line name and destination. A serial number in the display led her to the sign manufacturer: Trans-Lite Inc. of Milford, Conn., where sleuthing on Facebook and Reddit pages revealed engineer Gary Wallberg as the display’s original designer.

“It was proven through research that an engineer created this and not a font designer,” Sneddon said.

For a font designer, that was an important, and potentially challenging, obstacle. It wasn’t as simple as typing letters into a system. If the letters didn’t appear on any streetcar route — X and Q for example — then they didn’t exist.

Each letter had its own 5-by-3 grid, which lacked the flexibility most font designers covet. Creating an “$” and “@” symbol seemed impossible, but was crucial to complete the font.

Sneddon stayed within the “rules” of the grid, breaking the letters into modules, then “using them like Legos” to build the set. Fran Sans has no lowercase (yet) because it would require breaking the grid rules. But Sneddon created three versions of the typeface: solid black; a “tile” option that shows the geometric breaks; and white-on-black “panel,” which looks most like the Breda streetcar displays.

Fran Sans is part of a recent surge in love-letter-to-San Francisco fonts.

Designer Ben Zotto in 2021 created Fog City Gothic, an homage to San Francisco’s vintage street signs, then quickly followed with the Cow Palace-inspired Moonjumper Alpha. SFMTA officials have had fun trying new things with the lettering of the Muni worm logo.

Sneddon, in town this month to visit friends, has since moved back to Australia. But she hopes to return to San Francisco some day. As much as the views and good food, the designer lauded the curiosity and open-mindedness of citizens. (“When you’re pursuing something of niche interest, people really rally around you.”)

And she’s leaving something behind for the city. Sneddon said Fran Sans will remain free. Font and Muni fans can contact her through her site, where the detailed story of her design is waiting.

“I think some of the best design objects come from people making something that they just instinctively love,” Sneddon said.

and a shout-out to the journalist:

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle's culture critic and co-founder of Total SF. The Bay Area native, a former Chronicle paperboy, has worked at The Chronicle since 2000.

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