Palats Sportu (Палац Спорту) station sign of Kyiv Metro

Contributed by Yevgeniy Anfalov

Palats Sportu (Палац Спорту) is a station on Kyiv Metro’s “green line”, officially known as the Syretsko-Pecherska Line. It was designed by architect Mykola Alyoshkin and opened in 1989. The sign on the station wall comprises brass letters cast in Novohrad-Volynsky stating the name in Cyrillic capitals: “ПАЛАЦ СПОРТУ”. There is an image depicting an old version “ДВОРЕЦ СПОРТА” in Russian that was dismantled in the course of derussification. The authorship of these curios letterforms remained unknown for a long time, then attributed to the architect Alyoshkin himself, until Kyiv Type Foundry’s team found out the original (thanks to Florian Hardwig) during their Kyiv Metro Fonts project.

It’s typefaces called New York 30 and was made by Dutch designer Leo Meuffels for Mecanorma, a French competitor to Letraset, in 1984. It is likely that the Mecanorma catalog got into Alyoshkin’s hands. Alyoshkin says: “I don't remember where I saw these letters, perhaps it was a catalogue that circulated at the Metroprojekt. I wasn't happy about their size at the wall. They should have been bigger. Bronze was very expensive in the USSR.”

Further uses of the font are lesser known. One case can be found in the second volume of Yasaburo Kuwayama’s book International Logotypes from 1990, where “MEGAVIDEO” appears in the “dotted” logotype genre showcase as no. 2428.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

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