Margaret Calvert Drew the Cow on Britain's Cattle Sign

Margaret Calvert was 21 and fresh out of Chelsea School of Art when Jock Kinneir hired her, in 1957, to help redesign British road signage. The Anderson Committee had decided that the country's pre-war signs — all capitals, in dozens of mismatched fonts — were unreadable at motorway speed. Kinneir got the brief. Calvert got most of the work.

They started with the typeface. All-caps was rejected after legibility tests showed mixed case was easier to recognize at distance, because lowercase letters have distinctive shapes — ascenders, descenders, dots — and capitals are mostly identical rectangles. Calvert and Kinneir drew a custom face based on Akzidenz-Grotesk, with one detail borrowed from Edward Johnston's London Underground letters: a small curl at the bottom of the lowercase 'l'. They named it Transport.

Calvert then drew the pictograms. The men-at-work sign is a man digging. The schoolchildren-crossing sign — a girl leading a younger boy by the hand — was modeled, she has said, on herself as a child. The cattle sign is a cow named Patience, who lived on a farm near her childhood home in South Africa. Calvert had drawn her from memory.

The Worboys Committee adopted the system in July 1963 and the signs went up across British roads in 1965. They are still up. Sixty years later, drivers in the UK, the Crown Dependencies, and most of the British Overseas Territories are reading a cow drawn from a single girl's memory of a single farm.