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Most people don’t give the display screens on their commuter trains a second thought, but for designer Emily Sneddon, they’ve proved to be a well of inspiration. Sneddon lived in San Francisco, where she worked at the design agency Collins, from 2021 until this year when she moved back to her home country of Australia. She designed Fran Sans, her first ever font, after noticing the display on San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SFMTA) recently retired Muni Metro Breda Light Rail Vehicle. [Photo: Spondylolithesis/Getty Images] Unlike New York City, which handles its public transit through a single agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), public transportation in San Francisco and the Bay Area is split between multiple independent public agencies, like SFMTA, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), and Caltrain, a commuter rail. That means there’s no de facto official font for public transportation in the Bay Area as there is in New York City with Helvetica, the official font of the city’s unified Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). So Sneddon made her own. The font that became Fran Sans started first as a project documenting sans typography around San Francisco. The lettering from the train car display was supposed to be used on a zine coverthen it turned into a full-blown font. Sneddon designed Fran Sans on a 3×5 grid after a monthslong research project that included a visit to SFMTA’s Electronics Shop at Balboa Park, consultation with Gary Wallberg, a senior engineer who designed the display signs in 1999, and a survey of modular typography curated by Letterform Archive, which is based in San Francisco. “For me it wasn’t enough simply to create a 1:1 without digging further to find out more about the original designer that inspired this work,” says Sneddon. “It’s a myth that we’ve all seemed to have subscribed to that everything you’d want to know about is available online. But so many stories are all around us, and they haven’t been documented anywhere. The story of these displays was one of them.” The original lettering on the displays didnt have all the characters, as Muni had no need for Qs, Xs, exclamation points, or semicolons, so Sneddon had to make her own. For now there are no lowercase letters, as that would require a different grid, and she also hasnt managed to come up with a suitable “@” sign yet. Fran Sans comes in three styles: solid, tile, and panel. SFMTA finished replacing the Breda car with a new model this month that uses LED dot-matrix destination displays, which to Sneddon lack the character of the Breda car lettering. Fran Sans reintroduces some of those typographic quirks, like thin diagonals on the Z, 7, and M. Although those particularities can make the M look like an H at small sizes, theyre also what gives the font its charm. Theres a perception that San Francisco is a place where people come to make their bread and leave, Sneddon says, from the gold rush in the 1800s to AI today, but moving to San Francisco taught her that theres a lot of community, a lot of love for the arts, and a lot of generosity in the city.
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E-Commerce
Hooboy, here we go again. Chevrolet has once more rolled out a tearjerker ad for the holidays. Created by ad agency Anomaly, Memory Lane follows an older couple on their annual holiday drive to the family cottage in their well-loved 1987 Suburban. The trip takes them back to holiday memories and moments of years past that helped build their family. We see the kids go from babies and toddlers to bickering back-seat siblings to near-silent teens, all on the way to meeting them again as adults. For just about any parent, this is an absolute field-goal kick to the cryballs. Its a story that is specific to this fictional group, but a sentiment that will touch on similar memories for many viewers. Its also continuing the brands streak of delivering an emotional, well-told family tale for the holidays since 2021. Chevrolet CMO Steve Majoros told Ad Age that the strategy is not the hard sell, but rather to steer into the brands 114-year history. Im sure people are going to say, Oh, its the same formula and the same whatever, Majoros said. You know what? Theyd die to have the brand we have, and they would die to have the kind of connection we have with people, the legitimacy and credibility of our brand. So Im not going to apologize one bit. And why should he? Let other brands that desperately need awareness go full brain rot on TikTok. Here, Chevy is aiming to reinforce a reputation and legacy built over the past century with a creative strategy as solid as the classic cars and trucks featured in these spots. The brands emotional connection lives on through an 87 Suburban, a 78 Silverado truck (2024), 72 Suburban (2023), 57 Chevy Nomad (2022), and 66 Chevy Impala (2021). If I were ranking Chevys top three tearjerker holiday ads, this years would be a close third. In second is 2023s A Time to Remember, which the brand created in partnership with the Alzheimer’s Association. It follows a granddaughter’s drive to bring back some memories for her grandmother with a cruise around town. And in first place, last years The Sanctuary. Clocking in at more than five minutes, its a generational tale of fathers and sons that didnt feel overly sappy but definitely got some tough guys choked up. Now, whos cutting the onions?
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E-Commerce
Tucked in a two-sentence footnote in a voluminous court opinion, a federal judge recently called out immigration agents using artificial intelligence to write use-of-force reports, raising concerns that it could lead to inaccuracies and further erode public confidence in how police have handled the immigration crackdown in the Chicago area and ensuing protests.U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis wrote the footnote in a 223-page opinion issued last week, noting that the practice of using ChatGPT to write use-of-force reports undermines the agents’ credibility and “may explain the inaccuracy of these reports.” She described what she saw in at least one body camera video, writing that an agent asks ChatGPT to compile a narrative for a report after giving the program a brief sentence of description and several images.The judge noted factual discrepancies between the official narrative about those law enforcement responses and what body camera footage showed. But experts say the use of AI to write a report that depends on an officer’s specific perspective without using an officer’s actual experience is the worst possible use of the technology and raises serious concerns about accuracy and privacy. An officer’s needed perspective Law enforcement agencies across the country have been grappling with how to create guardrails that allow officers to use the increasingly available AI technology while maintaining accuracy, privacy and professionalism. Experts said the example recounted in the opinion didn’t meet that challenge.“What this guy did is the worst of all worlds. Giving it a single sentence and a few pictures if that’s true, if that’s what happened here that goes against every bit of advice we have out there. It’s a nightmare scenario,” said Ian Adams, assistant criminology professor at the University of South Carolina who serves on a task force on artificial intelligence through the Council for Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank.The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment, and it was unclear if the agency had guidelines or policies on the use of AI by agents. The body camera footage cited in the order has not yet been released.Adams said few departments have put policies in place, but those that have often prohibit the use of predictive AI when writing reports justifying law enforcement decisions, especially use-of-force reports. Courts have established a standard referred to as objective reasonableness when considering whether a use of force was justified, relying heavily on the perspective of the specific officer in that specific scenario.“We need the specific articulated events of that event and the specific thoughts of that specific officer to let us know if this was a justified use of force,” Adams said. “That is the worst case scenario, other than explicitly telling it to make up facts, because you’re begging it to make up facts in this high-stakes situation.” Private information and evidence Besides raising concerns about an AI-generated report inaccurately characterizing what happened, the use of AI also raises potential privacy concerns.Katie Kinsey, chief of staff and tech policy counsel at the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, said if the agent in the order was using a public ChatGPT version, he probably didn’t understand he lost control of the images the moment he uploaded them, allowing them to be part of the public domain and potentially used by bad actors.Kinsey said from a technology standpoint most departments are building the plane as it’s being flown when it comes to AI. She said it’s often a pattern in law enforcement to wait until new technologies are already being used and in some cases mistakes being made to then talk about putting guidelines or policies in place.“You would rather do things the other way around, where you understand the risks and develop guardrails around the risks,” Kinsey said. “Even if they aren’t studying best practices, there’s some lower hanging fruit that could help. We can start from transparency.”Kinsey said while federal law enforcement considers how the technology should be used or not used, it could adopt a policy like those put in place in Utah or California recently, where police reports or communications written using AI have to be labeled. Careful use of new tools The photographs the officer used to generate a narrative also caused accuracy concerns for some experts.Well-known tech companies like Axon have begun offering AI components with their body cameras to assist in writing incident reports. Those AI programs marketed to police operate on a closed system and largely limit themselves to using audio from body cameras to produce narratives because the companies have said programs that attempt to use visuals are not effective enough for use.“There are many different ways to describe a color, or a facial expression or any visual component. You could ask any AI expert and they would tell you prompts return very different results between different AI applications, and that gets complicated with a visual component,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University Law School.“There’s also a professionalism questions. Are we OK with police officers using predictive analytics?” he added. “It’s about what the model thinks should have happened, but might not be what actually happened. You don’t want it to be what ends up in court, to justify your actions.” Claudia Lauer, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
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