Moscow street navigation system

Dayev pereulok   Tverskaya ulitsa   Rojdestvensky bulvar   Bolshoy Palashevsky pereulok The plates work well with Moscow’s complex address system

Classic Moscow blue is used as a background color for elements of the navigation system Pictograms in the corners of the plates direct to useful or important city objects located nearby

The navigation system maintains the traditional shape of Moscow plates of recent years

Plates for the whole city

The second, simpler, design of the plates is made to be installed throughout the entire city with the exception for pedestrian zones.

Pleasant frames and roundings visually unite “historic” and standard plates

Two sizes of plates are available—small and large. In each individual case the choice is made according to the number of characters in the name of the street.

Kostikova ulitsa   Shmitovsky proyezd   Novoposelkovaya ulitsa

Arrows indicate house numbers at the corners of building blocks

For residential areas where houses are not placed along a street and are separated by considerable distances, vertical combination plates were developed with large and highly visible house numbers.

For reasons of economy it is acceptable to produce plates that combine the street name and the house number.

An original typeface, Staromoskovsky, was created for use on the plates. The face is designed in the spirit of traditional Moscow street name plates.

Book style   Bold style

Street signs

Street signs indicate the location of important city objects, organizations and landmarks. They are made in the form of either free-standing structures or panel brackets for mounting on lighting and utility poles. The signs contain the name of the object in two languages, its pictogram, address and walking time in minutes. To simplify typesetting and make comprehension of long official names of state organizations easier, universal rules for their abbreviation were created. All texts on the signs are typed with the Direct-Mos typeface—a modified version of the Direct typeface created specifically for navigation.

Simple sign   Sign with additional information

Besides the traditional blue background of the signs, a new brown one was proposed to visually separate cultural objects. Pictograms are used as a secondary navigation element. They convey the message even to those who do not know the language, as well as improve legibility of information from a distance, in bad weather conditions, in low light and so on, as their optical density is higher than that of text.

No words needed

The whole system of city street navigation is based on strict and coherent graphic principles. Some elements are common for all media: color scheme, typefaces and pictograms, positions of direction arrows. Unified layout allows to easily identify signs as elements of the navigation system and provide for their comfortable use, reducing the time needed to understand the logic behind the system.