MUSIC: Mr Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra
There are strange types in Britain that follow you around
wherever you go...
..telling you what to eat, what to drink...
what to see and where to go.
These types are so ubiquitous they're almost invisible.
We don't even notice that they are there...
..and yet they are alongside us...
..in the background and foreground of everything we do,
every single day...
..creating a backdrop to Britain for the past century.
They are, of course, typefaces -
the way in which we read a word -
on a shop front, a sign, a newspaper or a screen...
..and two types in particular are so fundamentally British,
you're so used to them that you haven't even noticed them
all around you.
They are Johnston...
and Gill Sans.
In this programme,
we will reveal how these typefaces have been scripting
our lives for decades...
..created by two unlikely and influential characters,
one of whom had his reputation overshadowed
by disturbing revelations about his personal life.
This is the story of Edward Johnston and Eric Gill
and their two types of Britain.
Words are all around us, everywhere we turn,
guiding us, informing us and tempting us.
But every word surrounding us is in a typeface.
I'm Mark Ovenden, and you might say I'm a bit of a typeface enthusiast.
Yes, they really do exist -
and why not?
Typefaces are so important and shape the way we see the world,
something that I've always found fascinating.
Typefaces nowadays are usually - and wrongly - referred to as fonts.
A font actually depicts the size and weight of letters.
Whereas the typeface is the important bit - letter design.
Choosing the right typeface for texts
is more important than you might think,
because how lettering looks conveys the emotion of the word.
Imagine how differently we might perceive
all sorts of important messages and brands
if they were in the wrong typeface.
As we rumble around on public transport,
we're constantly bombarded by messages for products or services,
but how can we differentiate between the crucial signs
that tell us where to get off the train or where to go on holiday?
We may think that we're quite sophisticated
but, actually, how we spot the difference
is the result of good design and really clever typography.
But it wasn't always like that.
In the early 1900s,
London and its traffic were growing at an alarming rate.
To counter this problem, the Underground was expanding,
with new tunnels deep below the West End...
..and extended lines reaching further out to the suburbs.
Paid advertising on the Tube station walls was nothing new,
and a useful source of additional income...
..but it was all becoming a bit chaotic.
Enamel and hand-painted signs and flyposting
were the equivalent of today's website pop-ups
or endless advert breaks on the telly -
and at railway stations, especially those of the Underground,
these ads littered every available wall.
The Underground was already in the midst of a redesign.
Architect Leslie Green had created
an arts and crafts inspired decorative feel
to many of the new stations in 1906...
..but this had not solved the signage and advertising confusion.
Much of this work is still visible
and has also been preserved in pristine condition
in now unused parts of the Underground.
Well, Mike, it's great to be down in these abandoned tunnels
underneath Piccadilly Circus.
Can you tell us something about the signage we can still see here?
Indeed. What you're looking at here is signage that dates
from the opening of this station in 1906,
when the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines opened here,
and, of course, this is one of the traditional ceramic lettered tiling,
in this slightly serif typeface design by Leslie Green,
the architect who built these stations -
but, of course, it's really very contemporary of that period.
It's a slightly soft arts and crafts typeface.
These little arrows, particularly,
are probably the giveaway in some respects.
A serif is a small flourish at the end of a letter,
rather like the stroke of a brush.
The Underground was using this style of serif lettering
on much of the railway signage...
..but a typeface which was different at every station
didn't make the network look unified.
They were obviously trying a simple,
similar style of lettering,
but didn't quite manage, actually,
to get consistency across their stations.
I think that was due to the fact
that several different manufacturers made these ceramic tiles,
so I think there was a subtle variation -
but they're simple.
The way they're laid out and the use of the lettering on them,
that actually allows a consistency of approach and legibility
and at the same time subliminally delivering the brand.
Frank Pick was in charge of publicity
for the London Underground Group at this time.
After years of signs being made in a variety of serifs and sans serifs
by the many companies running services,
he realised that customers could not clearly differentiate
between the station signage and adverts for other companies,
as it was all in this chaotic mix of styles.
Frank Pick intended to change this.
Pick began to commission scores of commercial artists,
what we would now call graphic designers,
to come up with posters to extol the virtues
of using the Tube in off-peak times
to explore London's edges
or to come into the West End for their shopping.
But he knew that he wanted the lettering to be really distinctive,
to stand out from the graphic noise of all the advertising,
to be straightforward, clear and, in his words, manly.
A lot of the designs,
specifically on the advertising posters
that were commissioned early on,
were beginning to stand out in this style.
One from 1908 highlights much of Frank Pick's vision -
a bright, confident poster
showcasing all the essential elements of taking the Underground.
Here you have those red-brick tiles of Leslie Green,
the Underground logo with the large U and the big D,
there's even a silhouette of London in there
and the map and a couple of catchphrases -
but the problem was all the lettering was different.
It just didn't look like a unified organisation.
However, everything was about to change.
Because a lot of the stations were styled by this
arts-and-crafts-based design,
much of the typography used at the stations and by advertisers
of the day were in a serif.
Frank Pick had the idea to radically change the lettering
to a sans serif,
which meant removing the decorative kicks from the characters.
He wanted a typeface that would be instantly associated
with the Underground, wherever it appeared,
so every time you saw it you knew where you were.
Since the sans serif he envisaged did not exist at that time,
he had no option - he would have to commission one for himself.
Luckily for Pick, London was buzzing with creativity in the early 1900s,
and a young man whose passion was the ancient art of calligraphy
was about to catch his eye.
His name - Edward Johnston.
At this time, Johnston was lecturing calligraphy
at Central School of Art and Design in London.
Catherine, what was Johnston's lecturing style like?
By all accounts, he was a real showman.
We have a set of photographs taken by one of his students,
it just shows his blackboard absolutely packed full
of kind of letterforms and different styles of letters,
some really quite flamboyant and exuberant ones.
So you just kind of get a sense of the richness
of what it must have been to have been a part of those classes, yeah.
Edward Johnston was also known in the arts and crafts circuit,
and it was here where he met Frank Pick,
who was fascinated by his work.
Given that he was a calligrapher,
that was quite an odd choice for Frank Pick to choose him, really,
wasn't it, for this modern sans serif he wanted.
I do wonder whether or not Pick took a punt on Johnston.
I mean, he was an odd choice.
He was embarking on something new, he wasn't an expert,
he was just opening out a territory,
and I've always thought that was interesting,
that he got a job as the head of something
and he wasn't known for it,
he wasn't really established when he got that job.
So I think it was more just maybe a sense of excitement
and buzz, and maybe Pick just thought,
"Well, I wonder what he's going to bring to this job."
Johnston's alphabet design for London Transport
was an anomaly -
a complete contradiction to much of his teachings.
Here was a calligrapher who taught his students by chalks,
quill and ink,
producing this radically neat style of block letters
without serifs...
..but he still managed to encapsulate
some sneakily-placed calligraphic touches to many of the letters.
When you have a broad-edge pen and you go to draw a dot of an I,
and of course it ends up as a diamond shape.
There's your comma.
So the punctuation, the tittle, as we call them,
was really formed from Johnston's background
as a calligrapher, really.
Yeah, absolutely.
His knowledge of a pen and the tool and actually how you
start to shape letters -
and it still is what gives Johnston Sans
a real distinctiveness.
So the way Johnston was doing it -
with a couple of chalks glued together -
is still relevant to type designers today.
Yeah, absolutely - but not just type designers, I mean,
I'd say anybody that's working with typefaces, and who isn't?
We're all using fonts on our computers every day.
It's just the most easy way to demonstrate the relationship
between tool and letter form.
Students can identify straightaway with it.
Also, you can rub it out. MARK CHUCKLES
From 1916,
Edward Johnston's new and very different lettering was adopted
for publicity material across the London Underground.
It wasn't the first sans serif invented during this time,
but it was the first to base its letters on Roman square proportions,
focusing on the narrow width of the strokes.
A feeling of progress was in the air,
a desire to clear up the messes of the past
and build a brave new world.
Unification of London's transport system was already well on the way.
In 1916, a man named Frank Pick,
on behalf of the new Underground Railway Group,
had commissioned a new sans serif typeface
from one of Britain's leading typographers, Edward Johnston.
The result is the clear, bold Johnston lettering
that graces London's transport system.
A truly 20th-century achievement.
The modern concept of intellectual property
did not exist during this period,
but the design was fiercely guarded by London transport.
So much so, printers who had access to the type blocks were forbidden
to use them on anything else.
The typeface was a complete success -
but it wasn't exactly a life-changing experience
for Edward Johnston.
After Johnston had delivered his first alphabets to Frank Pick,
he just carried on working at Central School,
he didn't really work on any other typefaces, did he?
I don't think he set out to be a great type designer
and I don't think he set out to be famous
or to achieve in that kind of way.
He was just really happy with his ideas,
with finding out and studying lettering.
Such was the success of the lettering for the Underground,
Johnston later went on to design a condensed version
of his typeface for the bus destination boards, as well...
..but with this new unified brand spreading across London,
Pick needed assurance that no-one would deviate from it.
What was needed was some kind of easy-to-follow instruction book
that everybody could copy,
and that's exactly what London Transport did in 1938
with the Standard Signs Manual -
the first time a corporate identity manual had ever been created
for any transport organisation in the world.
And here we have all the elements of what should exist on a sign.
Here's the logo at the top.
Underneath, all the station names,
even including what colour each of the lines would be in.
Thanks to Frank Pick's vision and Edward Johnston's style,
transport in London now had its own brand.
The signage stood out from the rest of the graphic noise
to form a clear and concise wayfinding system,
making it a lot easier to get out.
Johnston's creation defined London Transport.
Everywhere you looked, Johnston was looking back at you.
So no matter whether your journey was from Ongar to Kilburn,
you would know that the whole way would be guided by this beautiful,
aesthetically pleasing Johnston typeface.
London Transport jealously guarded Johnston's creation in its entirety,
which meant London was exactly where it would stay.
Johnston himself left the Big Smoke
to work out of the small East Sussex village of Ditchling,
where there is a museum showcasing much of his work.
I've seen London Transport posters my whole life
and admired the lettering,
but this is the first time I've ever held
some of the lower case wooden letters -
and it's just fantastic to see the calligraphic influences that are
brought out by some of these letters.
Just look at that big swish underneath the comma,
and the tittle, the dot, above the I -
Johnston's absolutely famous diamond...
and this double-storey, or eyeglass, G.
The attention to detail,
the balance that he managed to eventually work
into the proportions of that G are just beautiful.
This different and calligraphy-inspired design
changed the way London looked forever...
..but where did Johnston's vision and ideas come from?
To find out, I've come to meet his grandson, Andrew,
to examine Edward Johnston's beginnings.
He had a very strange start in life.
He was born in 1872 on a ranch in Uruguay.
It was quite an unconventional sort of childhood.
His father was quite a strange figure.
He was from this deeply religious family
but he corresponded with Darwin,
he had quite sort of revolutionary ideas
that children should do what they want.
The result was Edward was mainly brought up by his aunt,
who was very sweet but terribly neurotic
and worried all the time about him catching cold,
and so kept him basically indoors
and his father kept him uneducated
for most of his childhood life, really.
You would not think that going to a calligrapher,
sitting at this desk, using a quill pen -
how is he going to give you one of the world's best-known typefaces?
A most unlikely figure to then become a modern graphic designer.
ARCHIVE: The very way the word is written
is like the familiar voice of a friend.
The look of London Transport is its personality.
The triumphant, unified design that Johnston had transported
to tubes, trams and buses wasn't just in the typeface.
Frank Pick later asked him to redesign the Underground logo,
known as the bull's-eye or roundel.
After the success of the Underground type,
I think Pick saw that he could do other work for him.
One thing that he looked at was the bull's-eye, as it was called -
the solid red disc with some rather clunky sans serif lettering
across it on a bar.
Not an easy commission, and Pick was not an easy man to deal with,
but he did succeed in producing something that Pick liked,
which was to hollow out the solid disc into a ring,
place the lettering on a very carefully proportioned bar,
put ribbons above the lettering and below the lettering,
with a big U and big D,
and you've got a balanced logo that still survives to this day,
really, in modified form, and was a runaway success.
Johnston's designs and masterful teaching methods
were inspirational to many of his students.
It was in the classes at Central Saint Martins
where a young architect turned stonecutter
named Eric Gill first fell under Johnston's spell.
Eric Gill was well-known in art circles
for much of his sketches and stone carvings.
His early works had gained a lot of attention
for the manner in which they contained
both religious and sexual connotations.
Gill attended evening classes at Central Saint Martins College
in London to learn another art form - calligraphy.
He became transfixed by his lecturer, Edward Johnston,
and had even assisted him on his commission for the Underground.
Gill remained inspired by Johnston's success and began experimenting
to create his own sans serif alphabet.
A friend asked him to paint a sign for a Bristol book shop.
This would effectively be the first major exposure of a new style
that had never been seen outside of London.
Historically, printing words in books and newspapers
was a skilled craft.
Typesetters assembled texts by hand
from individual wooden or metal letters,
but in the late 1800s,
a mechanical method called casting was invented
that punched out the tiny letters from strips of metal.
One of the key companies revolutionising this trade
was called Monotype, based in Redhill in Surrey.
To make larger display-sized headlines for posters and adverts,
they created the super-caster,
which could automatically compile letters
into whole sentences from molten metal.
Monotype commissioned type designers
to make alphabets for their machines,
then licensed the rights to use them.
So every time a company used one of their typefaces
on adverts or signs, Monotype would be paid a fee...
..but they were on the lookout for something new and exciting
with a slightly Art Deco feel -
and they were about to find it.
Gill's new lettering was spotted on the book shop sign
by a consultant called Stanley Morison,
who was working for Monotype.
He was keen to commission something in this style
that the corporation could license.
It was the dawn of Gill's new typeface
that would alter the way Britain looked forever.
Not bad.
When working on early designs for London Underground,
Johnston was aided by his student Eric Gill,
famously handing him 10% of the fee for his assistance.
Gill's experimental design on the Cleverdon book store
adopted a Johnston-inspired sans serif.
He worked fast on his new commission,
and transposed the letters he had prepared for the shop,
turning them into a fully formed alphabet...
..but he didn't give Johnston a penny.
Here it is.
This delicate piece of brown paper lives here
in London's St Bride Printing Library,
hand-inked by Gill himself,
which shows just how revolutionary,
radically clean and light his typeface was going to be,
compared to the old, fussy serifs of the past.
All Gill and Monotype needed now was a customer,
a big customer.
By chance, the London North Eastern Railway,
who were then the second largest train company in Britain,
were looking to rebrand.
Cecil Dandridge, the LNER advertising manager,
had seen how the radical sans serif design
had brought clarity and authority to the London transport system.
He quickly ordered the Johnston-inspired lettering
of Gill Sans from Monotype
to use across the entire LNER network...
..including one of their most iconic locomotives...
..the Mallard.
By the middle of the 1930s,
the LNER had used Gill Sans typeface on every conceivable surface,
and when this magnificent blue beast
broke the world speed record in 1938,
pictures of its nameplate in Gill Sans lettering
went around the world.
Gill must have been thrilled
that his typeface now donned the Mallard locomotive.
As a reward for the success of his work,
Cecil Dandridge invited Gill aboard one of their other famous trains -
the Flying Scotsman.
Unlike Johnston, who had inspired his design,
Gill's lettering escaped the confines of London.
It's thanks to the railways
that this beautifully balanced sans serif typeface
got transported to every single corner of Britain -
from Land's End to John O'Groats.
Well, more accurately, from Penzance to Wick, where the railways ran.
It wasn't just the station signs that extolled this new design,
timetables, information posters,
even the dining car menu were all printed in Gill's radical typeface.
The LNER effectively popularised Gill Sans in Britain,
forcing all the printing companies
who worked for them to buy the typeface in -
and once they had it, they used it for everything else.
Gill Sans was sleek, modern, streamlined -
just like the record-breaking Mallard. They were a perfect match.
Other mainline train companies attempted to emulate the success
of the LNER's brave and smart new look,
adopting Gill Sans for some of their advertising too.
This made it the go-to typeface for many printing companies
across the country.
Turned out not too bad, really.
Just look at this. It really shows the clarity of Gill's thinking
in the design of this typeface.
Look at that perfectly circular O -
and the sloping edge of the T,
a very distinctive feature of Gill Sans.
A clearness and clarity of a sans serif like this
had never really been seen outside of London.
But how exactly did Gill's new countrywide design differ
from Johnston's London-based one?
Gill famously said that he thought that his alphabet
improved upon his master's, so it's interesting to compare the two.
This is Johnston's capital R,
supported by a completely straight leg,
almost like a piece of furniture holding up the bowl.
On Gill's R,
it's propped up by this wonderfully graceful sprung tail,
inspired by Roman and Trojan lettering.
I wonder whether maybe Gill has the edge on this letter.
Looking at the Gill Sans alphabet next to the Johnston one,
the untrained eye could easily mistake them as the same typeface.
However, they are anything but.
Gill used a lot of symmetry in his letters and numerals,
like this perfectly balanced 3,
which could almost be an 8 chopped in half.
Johnston's capital Es and Fs have a much shorter middle crossbar,
whereas Gill has them parallel with the top of the letter.
It was exactly the straightforward clarity Monotype were looking for.
They were so pleased with Gill's design,
they ordered alternate weights and improvements to it.
He went on to create several other typefaces, too,
although they weren't anywhere near as successful as Gill Sans.
Thanks to Gill's success, Monotype wanted him on a retainer -
and here's the contract.
"Gill shall deliver one new typeface,
"comprising both Roman and italic characters",
for the princely sum of £200 a year.
Doesn't sound a lot, but in today's money,
that would be more like £10,000.
But by the late 1930s, Britain was at war.
With the threat of Nazi invasion,
rationing and austerity were starting to bite.
In an attempt to boost morale,
an accessible and straightforward typeface
was required to use on much of the spirit-lifting propaganda
and information posters...
..a type that most of the printing companies
already had easy access to -
Gill Sans.
Edward Johnston and Eric Gill both passed away having witnessed
their creations dominate the British landscape.
Gill, who had remained in the public eye for most of his working life,
died of lung cancer in 1939.
Johnston, who had largely retired from public view,
died in his home in Ditchling in 1944...
..but the fruits of their work were very much still alive,
turning them both into cult figures in the arts and crafts world.
However, Johnston and Gill,
although close friends and clearly inspirational to each other,
could not have been more different.
The contrasts are evident when examining some of the sculpture
and drawings created by Gill throughout his life.
He was, on the surface,
a deeply creative and highly respected figure
in religious and artistic circles.
But behind closed doors,
Gill lived a life of sexual obsession
that mirrored much of his art.
Gill wasn't a straightforwardly moralistic person.
I believe he was genuinely religious,
but his personal life was extremely complex.
Cultural historian Fiona MacCarthy began researching
Eric Gill in the 1980s for a biography on his intricate artworks,
and uncovered details of his morally destructive life.
A lot of the work is religious in content,
but then there's this underlying sense of the erotic,
because Gill was passionately interested in sex,
and one gets this sort of curious balance in his work.
He was a very bizarre person,
a very extreme person -
but fascinating to study.
He was working on Prospero and Ariel in the 1930s,
the great well-known carving outside the BBC building,
and he was by then really very much in the public eye.
People were seeing him up there on the scaffold,
because he was a hand carver.
Gill couldn't decide whether he wanted to be this humble workman
or a superstar.
He was against commerce, but then took lucrative contracts.
He was profoundly religious, but deeply immoral.
So he is quite a hard character to get to grips with.
I think Gill couldn't resist being a celebrity.
He had this longing for public adulation,
but he also couldn't resist shocking people.
He'd make wild statements about politics and sex
and man's most precious, ornament,
which was, of course, his penis.
He couldn't resist the controversy.
Fiona gained access to the archive of Gill's personal effects,
including his diary...
..and the disturbing self-confessed entries
she found there were to shock the public
and tarnish much of his work thereafter.
I found a lot about the private Gill,
because he was very uninhabited in what he wrote down in his diaries,
of incestuous relationships with his sisters,
incestuous relationships with his children,
sexual experiments with the family dog, even,
because Gill was very, very obsessed with sex,
and the functioning of the body,
and these experiments were all noted down
in this extraordinary, meticulous way in his diaries.
He was, as one of his friends once said, mad about sex.
He could never resist the opportunity.
Even though the diaries were written 50 years prior,
the criminal and amoral details listed throughout
have led many to believe you cannot separate Gill's art
from his depravities,
and that knowledge of his terrible misdeeds
undermines the aesthetic value of his work.
I knew when I unearthed this material
that if I wrote the biography that I felt I needed to write,
bringing out all these aberrations of behaviour,
his sexual behaviour,
I was going to upset deeply a lot of the people who revered Gill most.
The revelations of Gill's private life led to many critics
calling for his work to be removed from public view.
It was, they argued,
impossible to appreciate his art
knowing it was produced by the same hands that abused his children.
Art creations such as the 1923 print titled Girl In The Bath
were viewed in a very different light
when learning that it was in fact modelled
on his 13-year-old daughter.
We're now more and more aware of the problems of child abuse,
the terrible problems that affect so many people in such desperate ways.
There is a resistance to looking at Gill's art with any seriousness
once you know the details of his personal life,
particularly the incest with his children,
and I understand where these people are coming from,
but I certainly don't think that one can write off the wonderful work
that he did because of the things
that one has to disapprove of in Gill's personal life.
Despite campaigners wanting Gill's sculptures removed,
his typeface has not been spurned in quite the same way -
possibly because it's a less emotive or suggestive art form.
It remains ubiquitous on modern word processing software,
and is still used by brands and businesses the world over.
It is instead the flaws within the design of the lettering
that's been the subject of modern scrutiny and criticism,
arguing that the sizing and shape of the typeface is not user friendly.
I've come to meet senior lecturer Ben Archer
at the Leicester Print Workshop,
who finds Gill's work slightly, well, mismatched.
Ben, Gill described his work as foolproof.
What's your take on it?
Not quite foolproof.
It's a less than ideal typeface made by an idealist.
Johnston, as a calligrapher, was used to working two-dimensionally,
on the flat.
Gill's got a more organic feel about the whole thing.
His curves are very sensuous.
That, I guess, is about him being a letter carver and a sculptor,
working with his hands, moulding shapes, I think.
But when examining similar-shaped letters in Gill's alphabet,
it highlights what some see as weaker elements to the design.
Here we have a lower case L,
a numeral 1 and an upper case I.
They're just all identical, aren't they?
It must have been very confusing.
The three Is, as we're now calling them.
So, you could have something that looks like it's "ill",
or it's a Roman three, you're not really to know.
Although greatly inspired by Johnston,
Gill did a lot of simplifying and refining to his letters.
Johnston's numeral 1, here, with its shaved, sloping top,
is a lot more distinguishable from the flat top version of Gill's 1,
or upper-case letter I and lower-case L.
To critics like Ben,
many of the issues he has with Gill's alphabet
stem from how difficult they are to distinguish between each other.
Take these lower case letters of P, Q, D and B.
When thrown together in a box of type...
..they are quite easy to mix up when they look pretty much the same
upside down and back to front.
For a typeface, to a nation of shopkeepers,
it's quite a serious problem.
For all that we know that one was
taking the other as the inspiration, you know,
they are very different things -
and, of course, their histories lead in entirely different directions.
Gill Sans became this utilitarian, quotidian sort of super face -
The Helvetica of England -
and Johnston was literally locked up and left underground
for nearly a century,
you know, protected and not freely available.
Even after their deaths,
Johnston and Gill's creations were still subtly encapsulating Britain.
By the middle of the 20th-century, it was hard to miss
either Johnston or Gill's typefaces.
Johnston was entirely synonymous with London,
from the tickets to the signage,
the train liveries to the bus stops -
but as the country approached the late '50s,
the first cracks began to surface.
Johnston's typeface, in particular, had a flaw.
As London Transport demanded more from the text on their publicity,
it forced printers and designers to push the boundaries.
The Johnston typeface, designed for wood in the age of steam,
was becoming unfit for purpose in the white heat of technology.
London Transport needed it available in a much greater range of sizes.
Because it was so inflexible,
London Transport began using other typefaces
for much of its printed material.
For the first time in 30 years, timetables,
adverts and posters were not set in Johnston.
Printing technology was advancing rapidly,
and the old stalwarts of wartime and austerity
were beginning to look a bit jaded -
and, even worse, for Gill Sans,
it was becoming a victim of its own success.
Designers of the day were looking for something fresh.
Gill Sans and Johnston were being shunned by the country.
Now replaced by more modern and chic designs.
Typefaces like Helvetica became far more popular.
Its letters were easier for printers to resize and for Britain,
entering its summer of love,
it didn't have the connotations of wartime.
Johnston and Gill Sans were now becoming just a little bit uncool.
Associated with officialdom, bossing people around,
telling them where to go -
but they weren't entirely dead.
One London-born designer was about to create an album cover for the
biggest pop group in the world -
and he was kind of inspired these big, red beauties.
OK, so the front cover of Abbey Road had no typography at all,
but the back featured the road name in ceramic letters,
and the track listing was deliberately chosen by the designer
John Kosh to be Gill Sans.
I'm a Londoner.
I guess I was influenced without knowing it by Johnston,
because it's all around me, surrounding me,
on buses that would go by, on the Tube trains.
Barred from using Johnston,
which was exclusively owned and protected by London transport,
Kosh turned to Gill Sans.
As a display face I thought it was perfect, free of use,
but I guess I didn't realise that until I got to art school
and we just started experimenting, and my favourite font was Gill.
I didn't realise that it had fallen out of fashion, to be honest,
I just thought it was a great, legible typeface.
John Kosh worked for Apple Records in the 1960s,
where he was responsible for design and publicity.
He was renowned for not letting the modern typeface trends of the day
dominate his work.
To be honest, I just started playing with...
Helvetica, in my early days in design, seemed to be too bland -
but Gill somehow just was a great display face.
Large, you can make it very stark -
but for text, with those ascenders and descenders,
you could just really read it without eyestrain.
And on Abbey Road,
it wasn't just the choice of an outdated typeface that
gave it an unusual look.
My claim to fame with Abbey Road was the fact that I did not display type
of The Beatles on the cover, or Abbey Road,
which caused a lot of consternation at the record company at the time -
but, if you notice that the lyrics and all the typography,
they're all in Gill because it's very legible,
and when we got round to Let It Be, Let It Be was just all Gill.
Right from the start. The Beatles didn't know I was using Gill Sans,
or probably even really care.
They didn't notice,
they were totally oblivious to what fonts I was using
and I just was, you know, my homage, I think, to my background -
and the Beatles, you know. Who came from Liverpool!
The Electric Light Orchestra...
..Aerosmith...
..the Eagles...
all Kosh designs,
all draped in Gill Sans,
a typeface that was dying out in the '50s and '60s was now back.
America seemed to be stuck on Futura, you know,
Rod Stewart's coming over and ELO's coming over and a lot of my clients
are coming over. Ringo.
And I just wanted to make them feel at home somehow.
They might not have known why, but this...
These are the fonts that they've grown up with or seen around them.
When I see Gill Sans in other people's work and in my work,
I just feel that there is a little thrill there
that they've chosen the right font, the right face.
So it goes without saying that it has spread round the world.
Gill Sans was slowly creeping back into British designs,
now digitised by photo typesetting technology.
By the 1980s, it was being used by many designers of the day.
It was, of course, a decade where style was everything.
The '80s was an interesting period.
It was an amazing period to be in the middle
of this huge explosion of new music, new fashion, new art, new design.
And some of it was technologically driven -
there was stuff we could do in the '80s
that you just couldn't do in the '70s or the '60s.
In the '80s, it became easier
to change the size of type and graphics,
thanks to the benefits of computer-aided design.
Neville Brody spent much of the 1980s as the graphic designer
for many of the cult magazines of the day,
such as The Face and City Limits.
Both of these adopted the clean elements of Gill Sans,
but with a contemporary twist.
We were able now to experiment with this on a regular level.
We didn't need to be kind of highly-trained type designers,
we could instruct something to be 10% width, for instance.
We brought this in The Face magazine -
particularly with City Limits,
it was Gill we were experimenting with.
We felt we could just be exuberant and joyful
and there was absolutely nothing to lose.
I think Gill Sans became again representative
of that kind of utopian idealism,
almost an optimistic belief in what culture could bring
and society could bring.
MUSIC: TRUE FAITH by New Order
It bought that romantic hope for the future
that was so absent in the rest of society.
This is a really good example
of your punching out your headline in Gill.
The idea, really, was how many variations
could you get out of the same typeface
without having to jump fonts?
So you were wanting to stick with just the one typeface,
but use it in as many different ways as possible.
Absolutely. So here you have it kind of bold, wide spaced.
Here you have it bold condensed.
Upper, lower case here, you have it bold condensed, but wide spaced.
So we're using it for so many different levels
of articulation and information.
Neville's typeface inspiration started from quite a young age.
I came across this, a book from my childhood.
It's an encyclopaedia -
and then realised that this was all Gill,
and it's Gill at a kind of super-sized setting here.
You wouldn't normally do this.
So what they've done is they've recognised in Gill
the ability to punch out and articulate content,
and I think that must have sat somewhere in the back of my mind.
A typeface that once had
unfashionable and authoritarian undertones
was now being used against the establishment.
It was even at the typeface of choice
on many of the anti-poll tax leaflets.
It's interesting, isn't it, that Gill's used quite a lot
by generally left-wing or campaigning groups,
but you don't see a lot of it used by anybody else.
No, the hard right tend to avoid it completely for some strange reason.
Maybe because it has slightly softer
or slightly more romantic connotations.
Whilst Gill Sans was invading the country again,
Johnston was being virtually annihilated in London.
London transport were using more contemporary-looking typefaces.
Johnston's range of sizes was limited,
and not digitised for photo typesetting,
making it impossible to use on a computer.
What was once the go-to choice for a clear and concise design
was now being substituted by other types -
including Gill Sans.
Fearful for Johnston's future,
London transport turned to design agencies
to try and save it from a cruel death.
It was a job that was entrusted to a young graphic designer
called Eiichi Kono,
who needed a plan to digitise it for a computerised industry.
Johnston was originally designed by Edward Johnston
for just display purpose, station names,
but London transport couldn't use for many different purposes.
When it's small in size, then it's not legible enough.
Readable enough.
Eiichi began painstakingly redesigning the typeface by hand.
Every day, I was drawing and then scratching it
with a scalpel and retouching it.
This process took Eiichi around 18 months to complete.
For the first time ever, Johnston was digitised for use on a computer.
A typeface that was originally only available in a couple of weights
now came in many more.
So, altogether I made eight different variations.
Light, medium, bold.
Then when the typeface is reduced, in a 6-point or 4-point,
in a small size, it works much better -
and after the digitisation was done,
Johnston survived again.
New Johnston was born.
It meant London Transport could continue to use it on Tubes,
buses and signs.
Also, Mayor of London started using it as official typeface,
so I'm very pleased and proud of it, and I feel lucky.
Still I feel, Johnston and Gill Sans
both are absolutely fantastic
humanist sans-serif,
and many other similar ones already come out,
that not really kind of, you know, surpass their popularity.
As new Johnston returned to the safety of its home,
at the same time, Gill Sans was being re-popularised as well.
In fact, Gill was about to be the trusted typeface of choice
for Britain's newest channel.
Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be able to say to you,
welcome to Channel 4.
The look of Channel 4 was created by designer Martin Lambie-Nairn.
All of the channel's on-screen text
and many of their printed adverts were all in Gill Sans.
An ironic choice, given that the logo
was very much of a serif design -
and yet they worked so well together...
..and it appeared a contagious choice.
Much of the television media also started switching to Gill Sans.
It was concise and easy to read.
In 1997, the BBC followed suit.
They wanted a logo and a typeface style
that would unify the entire corporation.
Sound familiar?
At this time, the BBC had a different logo
for almost every TV and radio channel.
A real mishmash of different designs.
Something needed to be done.
So, they turned to the same man who helped stylise Channel 4.
The BBC logo had got out of control.
Just about anybody who had a budget in the BBC
would commission a new logo.
The main logo itself was made up of the four-colour printing process.
And so, it didn't work in black-and-white.
So, not only did we have that problem,
we had 180 different logo types that the BBC was sort of using,
so the entire identity of the BBC was being fragmented,
rather than strengthened.
The old, tired BBC logo, set in an italic typeface,
was becoming slightly hard to read at an angle.
Martin Lambie-Nairn and his team were tasked with redesigning it,
moving from a slant...
..to a square.
Quite frankly, the old logo just simply didn't work on television,
because it was...it was sloping,
and the engineering of television is that!
So, it broke up.
So, we needed to create a logo type
that was going to be technically better and simpler,
and I looked at Gill
because of the association that Gill had with the BBC,
and, of course, all the sculptures around the building are his.
I think the typeface brought a kind of simplicity to the channel.
We were always aiming to keep things simple and clear...
..and it is a very unfussy typeface,
so it probably did emphasise that clarity.
But this evolution of design continues today.
Soon, there will be a new type on the block.
After 20 years, the process is happening all over again.
The BBC plan to phase out Gill Sans and replace it with a new,
in-house typeface - one that has used Gill as an inspiration.
So, for me, it begs just one question -
why do they want to change it?
Gill Sans was designed in the 1920s for the printed page.
Online, it sort of falls down somewhat.
It's not digitally optimised,
it doesn't have great legibility
when you look at long-form journalism, for instance.
So, we needed to improve that area.
We currently license a number of fonts - we'd reduce that spend,
we would own a typeface of our own.
For the past two years,
David and his team have been working on a new style of BBC lettering,
a typeface designed for the digital age.
So, shall we take a look at it? I'm very excited.
It's still work in progress, but I'm desperate to show you.
This is the new typographic look of the BBC.
You're getting a first glimpse at it now.
It's still in production, but it's very exciting.
That is absolutely beautiful, isn't it?
It's so lovely to see these echoes of Gill Sans
as well, on the S, for example.
This Q and the B, without that little corner on them.
One of the things that our typographers talk about
is the sort of Spartan elegance of Gill Sans.
We've removed the spurs from these,
which give it a real sort of friendly character.
When you put the B opposite the P, they're not identical.
There's definite echoes of where we've come from,
from the heritage of Gill.
On closer inspection of the new BBC design,
there are several obvious changes
that jump out when comparing it against Gill Sans.
Gone are the perfectly circular Os
and Roman-style, quirky flourishes on the Ts and Gs...
..now replaced with lettering that uses far greater spacing on screen.
And no-one's worried about the fact that it actually takes up more real
estate on-screen? Yeah - but to tick all those legibility boxes,
you have to make it breathe a bit wider...
Right. ..for it to work in, say, a wearable, or on tiny screens,
or whatever the future might hold.
The spacing's wider, it's bringing a better legibility,
giving it a little more breathing space.
It must feel quite exciting
to be looking at all these wonderful new typeface ranges.
It's incredibly exciting.
It is so interesting to see this new BBC typeface in the flesh...
..but I can't help but wonder whether we've slightly lost
some of the panache that Gill Sans brought to it.
Who knows? Maybe it'll be back in the future.
After all, Gill Sans is the comeback king of all typefaces.
For self-confessed design geeks like me,
it is truly inspirational that these two classic British typefaces
are still influential,
still evolving and still appropriate for modern times.
Whether it's the past glories of the Underground,
cult album covers or brand-new designs,
these two timeless British types
are as important and relevant now
as they were a century ago.
Johnston and Gill Sans convey that sense of trust and tradition,
quintessential British values,
that no matter how turbulent the times, you'll get home - safely.
Just follow the signs.
MUSIC: Silk by Wolf Alice