South Korean road signs
Commissioned by Studio Dumbar and the Hong-Ik University, Hangil E-type was designed in 2008/09 for the Latin names on the new bilingual and trilingual road signs in South Korea. While the normal style of Hangil E-type is already of narrow proportions to accomodate long place names, some very long words made an even more condensed version necessary. Still, we managed to keep the letterforms open, clear and legible to ensure good readability in the most demanding conditions.
The custom typeface was subsequently expanded and made available for general licensing from Bold Monday in 2010. The retail version is named Panno Sign and is accompanied by a version optimized for other use than signage, Panno Text.
Read and see more on Studio Dumbar’s website.
1 Comment on “South Korean road signs”
Thank you for contributing a post about the original use of Panno Sign, Pieter!
The typeface used for Korean text is unidentified. The English Wikipedia page about road signs in South Korea claims it is Sandol [sic] Doropyojipanche. This might very well be true, but I wasn’t able to confirm it. Sandoll’s website doesn’t seem to list a typeface under that name, indicating that it might be custom. If anyone has more info, please let us know.