Discussion

By Kevin Thomas on Nov 13, 2015

Nice, but the real question is when is someone going to create a sarcasm font...? :)

By Dov Isaacs on Nov 13, 2015

Au contraire, Frank! The London Underground does not and never has used Gill Sans. In fact it has used several generations of a font specially commissioned for it, “Johnston” named after Edward Johnston, the font's designer. Eric Gill was a student of Edward Johnson and worked on the font's development. Obviously, it did influence Gill's design of Gill Sans, but indeed, Johnston and Gill Sans are distinctively different fonts.

The current version of fonts used by Transport for London is “New Johnston.” Commercially, similar designs are available as ITC Johnston and P22 Underground. (At least a few years ago, you were able to buy licenses for P22 Underground as a souvenir at the London Transport Museum - guess what my souvenir was?).

To the topic at hand, though! Like Frank, I've never seen a Shake Shack – probably an East Coast / New York phenomena, but the upper case H, A, and K are very distinctive and provide a unique “look and feel” that other sans serif fonts don't have, similar in effect to what Johnston has done for the London Underground.

For my part, I'm glad to see such distinctive fonts used effectively in logos.

- Dov

By Frank Romano on Nov 13, 2015

Dov is right!

A spoken typo is a spypo.

By Eric Vessels on Nov 13, 2015

I've heard they did a sarcasm font (Sarcasma? Sarcastica? I forget). The problem was it was really hard to tell the difference from a regular font.

By Danny Justman on Nov 13, 2015

The architect's name is pronounced "noi-tra" not "nu-tra"
His son Dion corrected me when we first met!