A selection of European street name signs

by Perenyevackor

25 comments
  1. Very cool! Note that many cities have two street sign designs, modern and historical.

  2. This one Herr Wachtmeister,

    this one steels all the Schilder…

  3. Rome and London are class. I also like the elegance of the Germanic (pardon the term) ones.

  4. Eh, German one is not usual.
    Normally it’s a simple sans-serif font with no further decorations, either black on white or white on blue, depending on the city.

    Sometimes, a little sign is fixed below the main sign with information about the street name (usually for streets named after people).

  5. Helsinki’s sign epitomizes the Finnish ethos. Simple, bland and straight to the point.

  6. The Bern ones are interesting, since they come in a lot of different colours in the old town (red, yellow, black, white and green as shown here). This is because when Napoleons troops occupied Bern, they were mostly analphabets and could not read regular street name signs. So they divided the old town up into different colours and coloured the signs accordingly, so the troops knew where they were stationed.

  7. Nicely done Pikk

    >!Only Dutch speaking people will get this.!<

  8. Vienna is great, the regular blue ones also look good. Podgorica one is cool too.

  9. Hmm, Paris seems to stole the design from Bucharest 🙂

    Also I don’t about all others but in the case of Paris, Bucharest and London it seems the selection picked some of the most iconic avenues/roads.

  10. The one from Vienna is only half true. This is the old design, and we keep in certain places to preserve the historic look and feel of places and buildings, but usually it’s the font “Wiener Norm” in white on blue ground.
    Maybe not as dramatic as the shown font but still much more friendly and whimsical than most places with their non-serif modernist plain fonts.

  11. The one for Reykjavík is only rarely found in old streets downtown. The most common one is a very boring inoffensive black text on a white background.

  12. Puerta del Sol and that giant “Tío Pepe” sign… which I definitely thought was some brand of hot sauce. lol

  13. I would say Rome has the best one. But I also love how functionally descriptive ours from Stockholm are. We have street name, street numbers (up until next crossing) and the name of the block.

    And the block names in each area all have a theme. This area is themed after old military titles and also houses the Swedish Army Museum

  14. The one for Warsaw is kinda unfortunate choice – brown background is used for historic districts like the Old Town or Krakowskie Przedmieście, standard street sign use a blue background instead of brown.

  15. Regarding polish street signs: this one is the new format that contains: Street Name, adress numbers and district name (the red stripe on the bottom with white letters).

    They have the same format all throughout Poland with color variations for each city and type of street (Street, Alley, Boulevard, Square etc.)

    Older format was just the street name written in white on dark blue background (Based my comment on Wrocław’s old and new signs)

  16. This isn’t really a fair comparison – among the cities I know about you’ve got a mix of “normal” signs (eg Kyiv, London, Stockholm) and “fancy historical” ones (Athens, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Rome) – and I thus don’t know whether the other cities are normal or fancy. Would be cool to see a fancy example and a normal example from each city.

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