Frank Pick Wanted a Typeface That Wasn't an Advertisement

In 1913, Frank Pick was the commercial manager of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, and he had a problem with his own posters. Sharing a hoarding with grocer's bills and theatre adverts, the Underground's announcements looked like one more shouting voice. Pick wanted a lettering scheme that would be unmistakable as the railway speaking — and unmistakable as not a sales pitch.

He gave the brief to Edward Johnston, a calligrapher who had revived English formal hand-lettering through his teaching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. The brief was specific: a typeface with "the bold simplicity of the authentic lettering of the finest periods" that nonetheless belonged "unmistakably to the twentieth century." Pick did not want a revival, and he did not want an advert face.

Johnston spent three years on it. He took his capitals from Roman square inscriptions of the kind cut into the base of the Column of Trajan, then stripped off the serifs. The proportions stayed Roman; the strokes became a single, mostly-uniform weight. The lower case borrowed from older serif models, but with the same sans-serif treatment. The result, released in 1916, was unlike the squarer grotesques the printing trade had been using for shopfronts and notices.

It also worked. The Underground adopted it on every sign and poster, and when the London Passenger Transport Board was founded in 1933, Johnston came with the merger. The typeface has been the corporate face of London transit ever since — one of the longest-running corporate identities in the world.

Eric Gill assisted Johnston briefly on the project, then went off and built Gill Sans on the same skeleton in 1928. Gill Sans got the export career — BBC, Penguin, British Railways. Johnston stayed in London, on the trains.