A copy of an (allegedly) genuine letter from the RMT union to its more sensible counterpart at Aslef made me do a double-take.

Not for the weird polemic written which I read later, but for the instant question as to what font they used in the letter.

Copying the document into a word processor then typing bit of it out and comparing the fonts seemed to confirm my suspicion…

…the RMT uses Comic Sans font!

The font widely condemned as the most loathed addition to the typography world is the mainstay of probably the most loathed trade union in London.

Apt.

You can see the letter over at the excellent Going Underground blog.

Some months ago, I noted an advert in The Economist calling for companies to sponsor the stations on Dubai’s new metro railway.

As Annie Mole noted last December, the London Underground is also considering lifting its ban on station sponsorship – leading to a flurry of suggestions on another website I chat on for suitable brands to sponsor bits of the network.

This morning, I came across this news article – and it seems that sponsorship can be very lucrative – as the Dubai metro raised a staggering £343 million (AED1.8 billion) from potential sponsors.

They sold 47 out of the 57 stations – keep the 10 most sensitive stations free of branding. London Underground owns 250 stations – and on an (unlikely) direct value comparison, that could raise £1.8 billion for the tube network.

Blimy!

The naming rights only last 10 years – so in ten years time, the tube gets another lump of cash.

On Tuesday, I was invited to join a bunch of other London based scribes to have a lunchtime round-table meeting over at Transport for London’s iconic HQ building office round the corner from their iconic HQ building to get some feel from TfL about their communications strategy.

While no deep secrets were revealed to us, the meeting was very informative in getting a general feel from TfL as to how they see their success, or not, in trying to communicate their information to the public, and to get feedback from us lot as to where we think they are going well or badly (our humble opinions mattered!).

The meeting was started off by Richard Parry, TfL’s Head of Strategy, who explained the long term plans for TfL. Nothing surprising as most of the information exists on various locations, but often buried inside 200 page documents, or summarised in two sentences in those free comics you get on the tube each morning.

The key is to find some sort of balance between the two – and it sounds like the company is really giving a lot of thought to how to communicate not just the "its happening now" type alerts, but also the long term strategic vision. It’s a lot easier to tolerate the Victoria Line being shut early every evening if you understand the long term benefits.

One key message was that the disruptions are likely to last for the next decade, as the company has to find ways of working which minimise disruption caused by its massive upgrade program, but also allow for problems occurring and building in necessary contingencies.

This is where improving the communications about disruptions is so important for TfL – and obviously, us Londoners.

I was interested to learn that they have been pulling in focus groups over the past few months and working on improvements to their website based on feedback from actual users – and they showed us the recently revamped travel information page – which incidentally, I hadn’t actually seen yet. They will start a big media push in a week or two to let people know about the new services on there – or more accuratly, let people know about things which already existed but were hard to find.

I get the weekly disruptions email every Wednesday which is quite useful, although I expressed a rather technical issue with the email platform (geek overload) – but was surprised to learn that there is an SMS service which can warn you of any problems on your preferred route home. I was actually involved in bidding for the original contract at my previous employer, but didn’t know it had gone live – nor that they have about 2 million registered users!

Again – the information is there, but not instantly obvious – which was the point of the meeting.

We were able to provide our comments and suggestions as the lunch progressed and there was a lengthy discussion about 3rd party companies (or kids in bedrooms) being able to use TfL information to make up their own services. An example was that you can embed widgets in websites or onto your computer desktop.

I am a fan of "mash-ups" as they are known, where a company provides the information in a generic format (usually XML) and then let people play with it. So long as the data is accurate, does it matter how it is displayed? Also, opening up the platform means that while most of the uses will be frankly, pointless – someone, somewhere will come up with a revolutionary genius of an idea.

At the moment, I get the feeling that TfL are tentatively moving in the right direction – but we have a long wait before they offer open APIs for website developers to play with.

We also had some discussions about the personality (or lack thereof) in TfL communications. As we were bloggers who tend to write in a personalised manner, we like communications to be a little bit more fluid, and an observation was made that TfL has two distinct layers of communicating – HQ and Station. The HQ is very staid and factual, while the station is manned by humans with a wide range of individuality.

Nonetheless, the conversation was an interesting one, and I certainly learnt a lot about the tensions which exist within a large company which needs to be both factual and yet also not faceless.

The general feel I came away with is that TfL has spent a lot of effort recently beefing up the back-end systems so that information can be both factual and deployed rapidly. Now they want to work on improving how that information is delivered to customers.

Sounds like they got it the right way round – too many firms worry about how to communicate without building the back-end systems first so that the information is accurate.

I was also heartened to hear that they are very aware of the potential for mobile phones – not simply for sending SMS alerts but possibly for also mobile train display boards and the like. Something to look forward to, if they can get it working.

No more quickly finishing off a pint in the pub and walking to the station only to find that there are delays – I could have stayed in the pub for another pint and waited for the line to sort itself out

I was joined by M@ from The Londonist, Annie Mole from Going Underground, LondonReconnections, Lloyd at Perfect Path, OnionBag and Darika

Anyhow, thanks to TfL for bringing us in – it was very informative for us and I hope our humble opinions were of use to them (otherwise they’ll never do it again).

To see the newish travel information page – http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/traveltools/

To have a play with their widgets – http://www.tfl.gov.uk/widgets/

Last night I (and friend) had tickets to attend the opening evening of the Transport Museum’s latest exhibition – a history of posters on the London Underground.

It turns out that London Underground was probably the first transport network to commission posters from artists to promote the rail network, and the exhibition shows off some of the most famous and notable posters which the company commissioned.

There is also a display of posters designs which were rejected, including one by John Nash – which was deemed to be a bit too dull for use!

I was more interested in some of the older poster designs, and there were some comments about the difficulty of printing too many colours on early posters, so the artists had to be very careful when designing them to take those sorts of restrictions into account.

A few bits of the infamous fonts and styles – and at the entrance to the display is a newly commissioned poster by Sir Peter Blake – the iconic artist who is most famous for the Sergeant Pepper album cover – although he has done the odd other thing since then. He was the guest of honour last night and gave the opening speech, along with the curator of the exhibition.

I had my tickets as part of a recent fund raising auction for the museum, and the grandly titled Stakeholder Relations Manager, but very pleasant, Justine took us around some of the displays and showed us how to get up to one of the other displays which shows some of the printed posters which resulted from the art shown in the main display.

I also got a copy of the book accompanying the exhibition, signed by the two main editors (woo!) – and I have to say that based on a flick through it on the tube home, it is a very good book with absolutely loads of posters being shown inside. I don’t normally get excited about the books produced to accompany museum shows (usually being put together just to fleece visitors of cash), but this one is unusually good.

Towards the end of an evening spent wandering round with a glass of wine which was regularly and liberally topped up, I met the infamous Annie Mole who writes the Going Underground blog.

Rather a nice evening out.

The exhibition opens to the public today – details here: http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/136.aspx