Rogue Font

So, the other day, while walking to work, I noticed something quite strange. As about 32 cabs flew by me at high speed, I noticed one was not like the others. No, I'm not talking about the occasional off-color yellow that we find on some taxis. This was much more subtle.




Do we all remember this PID post from last year by Christina concerning the new NYC Taxi branding effort? One of the MANY central problems agreed upon by all was that adding the "chunky" NYC (global) brand to the centralized (yet equally confused) "Taxi" brand was creating a horrible mash-up of fonts and weights. Further research in to the branding effort of both the NYC campaign and the Taxi effort shows that there was a lot of earlier design struggle associated with the choice. The "NYC" style was glommed on later- in committee.

And then I see this...



From the best I can derive, this is the "pre committee" version of the taxi logo. It still sucks...no doubt (Baseline? Anyone?). But it's exactly 45% less sucky than the "final" version we see everywhere. I was unable to get an actual photo (the image above is from the NYC Visit commercial which has been running along with this campaign...clearly produced before the "glomming"), but I find this rogue font to be interesting none-the-less.