Skip to content

Tag: eric gill

Edward Johnston: Modest Typographic Purist

Edward Johnston

At The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright considers the work of Edward Johnson, and visits a new exhibition marking the centenary of his famous typeface for London Underground:

Although sans-serif typefaces (letters without the little flicks at the end of their strokes) date back to the 18th century, Johnston’s Underground typeface can be credited with popularising the style. Indeed, it was so influential that it became the typeface from which every 20th-century sans-serif typeface would be measured. As Gill later wrote in admiration, Johnston “redeemed the whole business of sans-serif from its 19th-century corruption”.

His former student was perhaps driven by the guilt of seeing the success of his own typeface, Gill Sans, which he admitted had been heavily based on Johnston’s work. Promoted and licensed by Monotype, and preloaded into computers, it has become much more widespread than Johnston, which is owned by Transport for London.

“I hope you realise that I take every opportunity of proclaiming the fact that what the Monotype people call Gill Sans owes all its goodness to your Underground letter,” Gill wrote in a letter to Johnston later in life. “It is not altogether my fault that the exaggerated publicity value of my name makes the advertising world keen to call it by the name of Gill.”

Little did it bother Johnston, accidental creator of one of the world’s longest-lasting corporate identities, who was never one for the limelight. When asked to submit a biography for Who’s Who, he was characteristically to the point, listing only three achievements: “Studied pen shapes of letters in early MSS, British Museum, 1898-99. Teacher of the first classes in formal penmanship and lettering, LCC Central School, 1899-1912. Designed block letters based on classical Roman capital proportions (for London Electric Railways), 1916.” But what influential letters they would turn out to be.

The exhibition Underground: 100 Years of Edward Johnston’s Lettering for London opens at Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in Sussex March 12 and runs until September 11.

johnston roundels

 

Comments closed

The Retiring Type: Intelligent Life on Edward Johnson

3679629462_bc4885b1ef_o

At Intelligent Life, Catherine Nixey tells the story of Edward Johnson, creator of the London Underground’s typeface:

The Underground didn’t commission a font to look different from commercial ones simply to sell it straight back to the commercial world. But that world wanted the font nevertheless. And so Johnston’s pupil Eric Gill obliged, creating Gill Sans, which would go on to be used on everything from the classic Penguin Books design to the BBC logo (since 1997)—and, later, many a Word document.

There is some suggestion that even Gill, not a man to be easily abashed, may have felt uneasy about this. He sent Johnston a letter that manages to turn, in a moment, from humility to boastful defiance. “I hope you realise”, he wrote, “that I take every opportunity of proclaiming the fact that what the Monotype people call ‘Gill’ Sans owes all its goodness to your Underground letter. It is not altogether my fault that the exaggerated publicity value of my name makes the advertising world keen to call it by the name of Gill.”

Did Johnston mind? We don’t know exactly. “I don’t think there was bitterness,” says his grandson. Though there was no money, either. “He was so lacking in business sense, he never charged a going rate for his work and so couldn’t make ends meet.” For the Underground font, Johnston was paid 50 guineas—about £4,000 in today’s money (he handed 10% of it on to Gill). By the time he died in 1944, “the finances were in a terrible state,” Andrew Johnston adds. “There had been a fund started by calligraphers in America to help this destitute master craftsman.”

(image via Mikey Ashworth on Flickr)

Comments closed

Monday Miscellany, November 2nd, 2009

Unpublished concept jacket designs by London-based print designer Allan Sommerville for the Penguin’s Bill Bryson books (via Cosas Visuales).

Fonts — This is AWESOME: Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best of Our Knowledge talk fonts with Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, designers of Gotham, Matthew Carter, designer of Verdana, author Nicholson Baker, Tracy Honn, director of the Silver Buckle Press, and Kitty Burns Florey, author of Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting. Listen NOW.

Many Happy Returns — Author, academic and newspaper columnist John Sutherland (The Boy Who Loved Books) on 30 years of The London Review of Books for The Financial Times:

The LRB front cover logo was “THE LONDON REVIEW of Books” – the last two words being smaller. As the typography signalled, it was the review that mattered as much as the book under review. Articles in the LRB were, and are, long: anything between 2,000 and 5,000 words. On special occasions they can run into the tens of thousands. Rates of pay seemed to me startlingly high: three or four times, in the early years at least, what the TLS paid. Miller personally appeared austerely indifferent to money. I suspect he worked for little or nothing. Nor did rises or falls in circulation appear to trouble him overmuch. Quality was all.

(There’s also a rather lovely addendum about the LRB’s personal columns, so read to the end!).

Somewhere Towards The End — A wonderful essay on editor and author Diana Athill by Ian Jack,former editor of Granta, in The Guardian:

[W]hat held me about the writing was its candour. The quality has since become an Athill trademark, though in itself candour is no guarantee of literary pleasure or interest: frank books aren’t always good books and can often be tedious by boasting of their frankness. Athill’s way of being candid is more subtle and its effect more persuasive… Part of this comes from her considerable gift as a maker of sentences, which are so lucid and direct; some of it is owed to the breaking of taboos that then surrounded female sexual behaviour; most of it, though, stems from her triumphant struggle to “get it right”, a lesson she learned from two of the writers she edited. Rhys told her that the trick of good writing was “to get it as it was, as it really was”. Naipaul said that “provided you really get it right, the reader will understand”.

The Internationalist — An all too short interview with Penguin Canada’s David Davidar, who was recently appointed CEO of Penguin’s new division Penguin International, in the Globe and Mail.

And finally… I do love Tom Gauld:

eric gills busy day

(More on Eric Gill)

Comments closed

Midweek Miscellany, April 15th, 2009

The #amazonfail shitstorm — from Amazon’s awful “ham-fisted”  glitch (a phrase so dirty it’s probably de-listed from their own searches) to the seething self-righteous indignation on Twitter — has been enough to make me want turn off the internet and go back to bed. But if you need  an overview of the whole sorry story, business reporter Andrea James has done a very thorough job following it for Amazon’s local newspaper the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and summaries, shivering with schadenfreude, can be found in the New York Times, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and the National Post.  No doubt the other major dailies were all over it too…

Former PW editor Sara Nelson at The Daily Beast , Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy, and the Vromans Bookstore Blog offer some alternative perspectives.

But I’ve got to say I agree with Jessa Crispin at BookSlut: “I’m bored with this.”

(UPDATE: Clay Shirky has written perhaps the most thoughtful post on #amazonfail I’ve read to date: The Failure of #amazonfail)

Lets. Move. On…

Straight Up — Knopf designer Peter Mendelsund who moonlights as art director of Vertical Press and blogs at Jacket Mechanical,  interviewed at the always ace FaceOut Books (Smell Man by Munenori Harada, designed by Peter Mendelsund pictured above).


Contact — Filmmaker and writer Adam Harrison Levy on William Klein’s recent appearance in New York and the importance book-signings (William Klein: Buicks, 2 tiered, New York, 1955, Howard Greenberg Gallery, pictured above):

A book signing is a manifestation of an urge to recover something that we, as a culture, fear losing — namely the hand of the artist in the age of mechanical (and digital) reproduction. Now more than ever it seems that we want to get close to creativity: to hear the voice and see the skin and experience the physical presence of the person who made something that we deem to be meaningful. Is this because so much of our lives now is mediated through a screen?

What Went Wrong? — An interesting article (and something of a mea culpa) in the Boston Globe about the mistakes and missed opportunities made by newspapers underestimating the impact of the web.

In Perpetua — MyFonts strike up a ‘dialogue’ with Eric Gill (1882 – 1940), stonecarver, graphic artist, type designer and writer:

If we insist on the ornamental we are not making the best of our system of manufacture, we are not getting the things that system makes best. The process by which a railway locomotive has become the beautiful thing it now is, this process must be welcomed in all other departments of manufacture. … And ornamental typography is to be avoided no less than ornamental architecture in an industrial civilization.

We Love Typography —  “FFFFound for all things type, typography, lettering, & signage” created by I Love Typography in collaboration with Kari Pätilä.

And finally, I would like to pass on my condolences to the friends and family of Derek Weiler, editor of the Quill & Quire, who died at the weekend, aged 40.

Comments closed