Dubai Metro
When it opened in 2009, Dubai Metro gave the Gulf its first taste of revolutionary rapid transit – two driverless lines threading through a fast-growing city, swift enough to set a world record for the world’s longest automated network.
TDC, now part of Maynard, delivered the wayfinding system for those early passengers, and continues to shape it today as new lines join the growing metro.
Before 2009, Dubai – and the wider region – had no metro of its own, and most residents had never set foot on one, anywhere. With many passengers stepping onto a train for the very first time, there was no shared etiquette to lean on, no muscle memory to trigger. TDC’s system had to teach people how to use a metro in the same breath as guiding them through it with confidence.
More than two-hundred nationalities reside in Dubai, and nine in ten are expats. For its metro, there is no single audience and no single shared language; information design has to function equally for locals, for a workforce drawn from across the world, and for tourists stopping by.
Rather than adapt an existing typeface, TDC designed one from scratch: an exclusive dual Arabic and Latin script built to sit side by side with equal clarity and equal weight, so no passenger's first language came second. That choice became the spine of a system that guided over a quarter of a million passengers through the network in its opening week alone – proof that legibility, done right, doesn't need translating.