For the first, 987 participants were shown the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" in one of six fonts and styles: Times New Roman regular, Times New Roman bold, Times New Roman italic, Gill Sans regular, Gill Sans bold or Gill Sans italic.
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For example, study participants saw Times New Roman as more conservative than Gill Sans.
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And Century Gothic was viewed as more liberal than Gill Sans, even though they're both sans serif fonts.
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Jean François Porchez has designed custom fonts for Beyonce and top print newspapers around the world, and recommends the Gill Sans family.
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But with this all you have is the slogan in the BBC typeface—it's actually a slight modification on the Gill Sans font—and the crown on the color red.
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Each cover also stuck to a strict, simplistic design strategy: a central band of white contained the book's title in the Gill Sans typeface, while the color-coded top and bottom bands were adorned with the Penguin brand name and logo.
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Colin Burns, the BBC's Chief Design Officer with Design & Engineering explained that the current fonts — Gill Sans, Arial, and Neue Helvetica — were "developed [in the] last century and work well in print," but that they don't always show up clearly on small screens.
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For the second experiment, 1,069 participants were shown either the phrase "A large fawn jumped quickly" or the name "Scott Williams" in one serif font (Jubilat or Times New Roman), one sans serif font (Gill Sans or Century Gothic) and one display font (Sunrise, Birds of Paradise or Cloister Black Light).
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The Typeset in the Future essays are arranged chronologically for each film, so it's possible to watch these movies with the book in hand, pausing to appreciate the similarities of the Federation logos in Star Trek: The Motion Picture to the flag of the United Nations, or the curious way the end credits of 2001 mix an "M" from Gill Sans into the Futura.
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Gill Sans on a 1949 British Railways poster. Gill Sans rapidly became very popular. Its success was aided by Monotype's sophisticated marketing, led by Gill's supporter (and sometime lover) Beatrice Warde, and due to its practicality and availability for machine composition in a very wide range of sizes and weights. Despite the popularity of Gill Sans, some reviews have been critical.
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Compilation image of some of the fonts of the Gill Sans family that are mostly intended for display use. Detail differences are obvious, especially the "single-storey" "a" on Extra Condensed Bold. Following the initial success of Gill Sans, Monotype rapidly produced a wide variety of other variants. In addition, Monotype sold moulds (matrices) for Gill Sans in very large sizes for their "Supercaster" type- casting equipment.
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This makes it legally permissible to create alternative digitised versions of Gill Sans (although not necessarily of later Monotype additions to the font such as the book weight and Euro sign). However, the name "Gill Sans" remains a Monotype trademark (no. 1340167 in the US) and therefore is not eligible to be used to name any derivative font. No complete, direct open-source Gill Sans clone has yet been released.
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As of 2019, Monotype's current digitisation of Gill Sans is Gill Sans Nova, by George Ryan. Gill Sans Nova adds many additional variants, including some of the previously undigitised inline versions, stylistic alternates and an ultra-light weight which had been drawn for Grazia. The fonts differ from Gill Sans MT (MT stands for Monotype) in their adoption of the hooked 1 as default, while the regular weight is renamed 'Medium'. Monotype celebrated the release with a London exhibition on Gill's work, as they had in 1958 to mark the general release of Gill's serif design Joanna.
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Parisine Office was a version created for RATP in 2005, as replacement of Gill Sans. It became the first variant designed in OpenType. The font was commercially available in June 2008. It consists of over 600 characters, and is metric-compatible with Gill Sans.
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Gill Sans compared to other sans-serifs of the period. Gill Sans does not use the single-storey "g" or "a" used by many sans-serifs and is less monoline than Johnston. Its structure is influenced by traditional serif fonts such as Caslon rather than being strongly based on straight lines and circles as Futura is. The proportions of Gill Sans stem from monumental Roman capitals in the upper case, and traditional "old-style" serif letters in the lower.
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His student Eric Gill, who worked on the development of the typeface, later used it as a model for his own Gill Sans, released from 1928. As a corporate font, Johnston was not available for public licensing until recently, and as such Gill Sans has become more widely used.
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Notable non-British modern businesses using Gill Sans include United Colours of Benetton (which commissioned a custom variant), Tommy Hilfiger and Saab Automobile. British rock band Bloc Party has used Gill Sans in its logo. AT&T; used it until 2006, before changing it to Clearview after feeling that it was too in keeping with market research that people found the company "monolithic". The United States Agency for International Development uses Gill Sans for its ubiquitous logo and other branding materials.
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The sans-serif is similar to Gill Sans and to Johnston; the serif reflects the classical Renaissance humanist model.
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A Penguin Books paperback from 1949 compared to digital Gill Sans semi-bold, showing subtle differences in weight and spacing. The digital releases of Gill Sans fall into several main phases: releases before 2005 (which includes most bundled "system" versions of Gill Sans), the 2005 Pro edition, and the 2015 Nova release which adds many alternate characters and is in part included with Windows 10. In general characteristics for common weights the designs are similar, but there are some changes: for example, in the book weight the 2005 release used circular ij dots but the 2015 release uses square designs, and the 2015 release simplifies some ligatures. Digital Gill Sans also gained character sets not present in the metal type, including text figures and small capitals.
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In the marketing of the Newton/Notepad/MessagePad PDA (starting in 1992), Apple used Gill Sans instead of the regular Apple Garamond. Gill Sans Regular was used in the logo, for the model name on the computer, on the keyboard and in advertisement materials, though it was not used as a screen font (except as part of the Newton logo).
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Edward Tufte, the information design theorist, uses Gill Sans on his website and in some of his published works. The Wikimedia Foundation uses Gill Sans on its wordmark. Many newer Mitsubishi elevator buttons use a derivative of the font, replacing Helvetica, as some numbers (such as "6" and "9") are more easily distinguishable. Some old Express Lift buttons also use the font.
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Frank Pick, the Underground Electric Railways Company managing director who commissioned Johnston's typeface, privately thought Gill Sans "a rather close copy" of Johnston's work.
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Gill's drawings of Gill Kayo. Its working title "Sans Double Elefans" is visible at bottom left, and his "EG" signature at bottom right. In 1936, Gill and Monotype released an extremely bold sans- serif named Gill Kayo (from KO, or knockout, implying its aggressive build). This has often been branded as Gill Sans Ultra Bold, though in practice many letters vary considerably from Gill Sans.
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Lettering was to use the Gill Sans typeface on a background of the regional colour. Gill Sans was also used in much of its printed output, very often in capitals-only settings for signage. Specially drawn variations were developed by the Railway Executive (part of the British Transport Commission) for signs in its manual for the use of signpainters painting large signs by hand.
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Lettering on an Eastern Region of British Railways sign. While the lettering is clearly based on Gill Sans, some letters such as the R are very different. The Sheffield type foundry Stephenson Blake rapidly released a commercial competitor named Granby, influenced by Gill Sans, Johnston and Futura. Granby was a large family with condensed and inline styles; it has a diamond-dot design like Johnston.
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Arial, popularized by Microsoft, is a common Helvetica substitute. Other fonts such as Futura, Gill Sans, Univers and Frutiger have also remained popular over many decades.
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An immediate success, the year after its release the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) chose it for all its posters, timetables and publicity material. British Railways chose Gill Sans as the basis for its standard lettering when the railway companies were nationalised in 1948. Gill Sans also soon became used on the modernist, deliberately simple covers of Penguin Books, and was sold up to very large sizes which were often used in British posters and notices of the period. Gill Sans was one of the dominant typefaces in British printing in the years following its release, and remains extremely popular: it has been described as "the British Helvetica" because of its lasting popularity in British design.
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Gill Sans, a humanist lineal typeface Humanist typefaces, instead of deriving from the 19th century grotesque faces, relate to the earlier, classical handwritten monumental Roman capitals and a lowercase similar in form to the Carolingian script. Note that the term "humanist" is being used here in combination with lineal to create a subcategory, and these typefaces only slightly resemble those in the humanist serif category. Examples of humanist lineal typefaces include Gill Sans and Optima.
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Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards. Gill Sans is based on Edward Johnston's 1916 "Underground Alphabet", the corporate font of London Underground. As a young artist, Gill had assisted Johnston in its early development stages. In 1926, Douglas Cleverdon, a young printer-publisher, opened a bookshop in Bristol, and Gill painted a fascia for the shop for him in sans-serif capitals.
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The italics are a combination of humanist italic forms, seen in the lowercase italic q, and the obliques of industrial or grotesque sans-serifs, seen in the lowercase italic a, which retains two storeys, unlike in other humanist sans-serif typefaces like FF Scala Sans and Gill Sans, where the a has a single storey italic. On its release Jan Tschichold praised Syntax as "very easy to read, well designed: better than the related Gill Sans".
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Often misidentified as Gill Sans, the Toronto Subway Font is based on Futura. Somewhat similar typefaces include Johnston (used by Transport for London), Verlag, Bernhard Gothic, Metro, Brandon Grotesque, Neutraface, and Eagle.
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New Johnston is used for signage in the fictional Princeton–Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in the Fox TV show House, although in later seasons the similar font Gill Sans was used, most noticeably on Wilson's door during season 8. It is also used in the way finding signage at Westfield London. Hong Kong Citybus and NWFB buses also use the font on the front route number display. Johnston (upper) and Gill Sans (lower), showing some of the most distinctive differences between these similar typefaces.
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Besides similar fonts, many signs and objects made in Britain during the period of Gill Sans' dominance, such as the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, received hand-painted or custom lettering similar to Gill Sans. Fighter Command during the war used a standard set of letters similar to it. Matthew Carter, later a prominent font designer, recalled in 2005 that when his mother cut linoleum block letters for him to play with during the Blitz they were based on it. Another little-known follower was the NEN 3225 standard lettering, a project by the Dutch Standards Institute to create a set of standardised lettering for public use in the Netherlands, comprising a sans- serif similar to Gill Sans and a companion serif font drawn by Jan van Krimpen.
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At the same time as the late development of Optima, Zapf was also working on a non-modulated sans for Linotype, to be named Magnus and intended to compete with Gill Sans. It was ultimately never released.
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Monotype created an infant version of Gill Sans using single-storey "a" and "g", and other more distinguishable characters such as a rounded "y", seriffed "1" and lower-case "L" with a turn at the bottom. Infant designs of fonts are often used in education and toys as the letters are thought to be more recognisable to children being based on handwriting, and are often produced to supplement popular families such as Gill Sans, Akzidenz-Grotesk and Bembo. Monotype also created a version with rounded stroke ends for John Lewis for use on toys.
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A railway timetable using Gill Sans from 1950 Royal Station Hotel in York, 1940 Gevaert negatives) are in Gill Sans using the "continental" alternates resembling Futura Typeface designs are in many countries not copyrightable, while in others such as the United Kingdom the design is out of copyright with 70 years passed since Gill's death in 1940, by which time the metal type family was essentially completed.Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (c. 48), § 54 (England)Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 (Ireland), §§ 84–85. Accessed 31 January 2013.
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According to Mike Ashworth of Transport for London, London Transport itself made some use of Granby by the 1960s due to the limited availability of Johnston metal type. It also used Gill Sans for printed ephemera, such as timetables.
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Alternate characters in Gill Sans Nova, most or all based on those offered in the metal type era. Monotype developed a set of alternate characters for Gill Sans to cater for differing tastes and national printing styles of different countries. These include Futura-inspired designs of "N", "M", "R", "a", "g", "t" and others, a four-terminal "W" in the French renaissance style, a tighter "R", a "Q" in the nineteenth-century style with a tail that looped upwards (similar to that on Century among others, and preferred by the LNER), oblique designs as opposed to the standard true italic, a more curving, true-italic "e" and several alternative numerals. In particular, in the standard designs for Gill Sans the numeral "1", upper-case "i" and lower-case "L" are all a simple vertical line, so an alternate "1" with a serif was sold for number-heavy situations where this could otherwise cause confusion, such as on price-lists.
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Like all metal type revivals, reviving Gill Sans in digital form raises several decisions of interpretation, such as the issue of how to compensate for the ink spread that would have been seen in print at small sizes more than larger. As a result, printed Gill Sans and its digital facsimile may not always match. The digital release of Gill Sans, like many Monotype digitisations, has been criticised, in particular for excessively tight letter-spacing and lack of optical sizes: with only one design released that has to be used at any text size, it cannot replicate the subtlety of design and spacing of the metal type, for which every size was drawn differently. In the hot metal era different font sizes varied as is normal for metal type, with wider spacing and other detail changes at smaller text sizes; other major sans-serif families such as Futura and Akzidenz-Grotesk are similar.
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Along with Gill Sans, Tschichold made use of Monotype Bembo, Monotype Centaur (by Bruce Rogers) and Gill's Perpetua typeface. The covers conformed to the golden ratio (4⅜" × 7⅛", 111mm × 181mm). For Penguin's distinctive orange color, Tschichold replaced it with a warmer tone.
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The logo shows a stylised outline of Queen Leonor's crowned head in blue tones, representing the city's historical connection with water. Below the queen's image, the municipality's name appears in all caps in Eras Light. Below this "Câmara Municipal" is written in Gill Sans.
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Some of Gill's original art for Gill Sans, showing the original "Q", punctuation and two manicules. Gill Sans' technical production followed Monotype's standard method of the period. The characters were drawn on paper in large plan diagrams by the experienced drawing office team, led and trained by Pierpont and Fritz Steltzer, both of whom Monotype had recruited from the German printing industry. The drawing staff who executed the design was disproportionately female and in many cases recruited from the local area and the nearby Reigate art school; they worked out many aspects of the final drawings including adaptations of the letters to different sizes and the spacing.
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Gill Sans therefore particularly achieved worldwide popularity after the close of the metal type era and in the phototypesetting and digital era, when it became a system font on Macintosh computers and Microsoft Office. One use of Gill's work in the United States in this period, however, was a custom wordmark and logo made by Gill for Poetry magazine in 1930 based on Gill Sans. Its editor Harriet Monroe had seen Gill's work in London. The BBC logo at BBC Broadcasting House, Belfast The BBC adopted the typeface as its corporate typeface in 1997 for many but not all purposes, including on its logo.
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A digitisation by K-Type was released in 2018. Several intended Gill Sans competitors were developed during the period of its popularity but ultimately did not see mass release. Jan Tschichold, who would later make extensive use of Gill Sans while designing books for Penguin, created a similar design for an early phototypesetting machine, which was at the time little-used but also since digitised. During the 1930s Dutch type designer Jan van Krimpen, also a friend of Morison's, worked on a superfamily named Romulus, with serif and humanist sans-serif companion: the sans-serif, with a low x-height, never progressed beyond test proofs.
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Monotype offered Gill Sans on film in the phototypesetting period. The fonts released in 1961 included Light 362, Series 262, Bold 275, Extra Bold 321, Condensed 343, all of which were released in film matrix sets "A" (6–7 points) and "B" (8–22, 24 points).
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Notable humanist sans- serif typefaces include Gill Sans, Goudy Sans, FF Meta and FF Scala Sans; all have italic designs. Adrian Frutiger and other prominent designers have defended obliques as more appropriate for the aesthetic of sans-serif fonts, while Martin Majoor has supported the use of true italics.
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The design was begun in 1932; some of the first drawings may have been prepared by Gill's son-in-law Denis Tegetmeier. It made a return to popularity in the graphic design of the 1970s and 80s, when Letraset added a condensed weight. The boldest weights of Gill Sans, including Kayo, have been particularly criticised for design issues such as the eccentric design of the dots on the "i" and "j", and for their extreme boldness. (Gill Sans' standard weight is, as already noted, already quite bold by modern standards.) Gill argued in his Essay on Typography that the nineteenth-century tendency to make sans-serif typefaces attention-grabbingly bold was self-defeating, since the result was compromised legibility.
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Explaining the change, designer Martin Lambie-Nairn said that "by choosing a typeface that has stood the test of time, we avoid the trap of going down a modish route that might look outdated in several years' time". The BBC had an earlier association with Gill, who created some sculptures on Broadcasting House. Other more recent British organisations using Gill Sans have included Railtrack (and initially its successor Network Rail), John Lewis and the Church of England, which adopted Gill Sans as the typeface for the definitive Common Worship family of service books published from 2000. The British Armed Forces has also used Gills Sans on some stores labels on equipment and ammunition crates.
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The box structure itself is similar to the other BBC Channels, but the slanted text is different from all of the other channels, who at the time had the channel name in Gill Sans below the BBC logo. In 2005, the box colour was changed from white to blue with white text. The channel's original DOG consisted of the style previously used on the BBC's channels, using the BBC logo follower by an upper case 'THREE' in the font Gill Sans. This lasted until 2005, when it was replaced by a DOG proclaiming the channel as 'Channel of the Year' in upper case and in the same font as the BBC Three logo.
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Gill Sans has influenced many other typefaces, and helped to define a genre of sans-serif, known as the humanist style. Monotype rapidly expanded the original regular or medium weight into a large family of styles, which it continues to sell. A basic set is included with some Microsoft software and macOS.
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This gives Gill Sans a very different style of design to geometric sans-serifs like Futura, based on simple squares and circles, or grotesque or "industrial" designs like Akzidenz-Grotesk, Helvetica and Univers influenced by nineteenth- century lettering styles. For example, compared to grotesque sans-serifs the "C" and "a" have a much less "folded up" structure, with wider apertures. The "a" and "g" in the roman or regular style are "double-storey" designs, rather than the "single-storey" forms used in handwriting and blackletter often found in grotesque and especially geometric sans-serifs. A drawing and photographed carving by Gill of the "Trajan" capitals on the Column of Trajan, a model for the capitals of Gill Sans and Johnson.
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Like both Johnston and Gill Sans, Granby has an upper-case influenced by Roman square capitals and a lower-case inspired by traditional "old-style" serif letters, making it an example of what is now called the humanist style of sans-serif fonts. Granby’s regular style is a robust design bolder than conventional body text fonts, making it suitable for headings and posters and also for legible text at smaller sizes. Stephenson Blake had prepared type for the Johnston project and Granby is almost identical in many ways, more like Johnston than Gill Sans with diamond-shaped dots (tittles) on the 'i' and 'j' and a wide ‘a’. A difference is its ‘g’, a ‘single-storey’ design influenced by handwriting.
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Popular with advertisers, this allowed end-users to cast their own type at a very competitive price. This made it a popular choice for posters. Gill's biographer Malcolm Yorke has described it as "the essence of clarity for public notices". Versions of Gill Sans were created in a wide range of styles such as condensed and shadowed weights.
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The long series of extensions, redrawings and conversions into new formats of one of Monotype's most important assets (extending long beyond Gill's death) has left Gill Sans with a great range of alternative designs and releases. A book weight was created in 1993 in between the light and regular weight, suitable for body text, along with a heavy weight.
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FF Dax is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Hans Reichel, published by FontFont library. The typeface is popular in advertising and in marketing. It is a "spurless" sans-serif, similar to typefaces like Semplicità and some characters in Gill Sans, where strokes end without terminals. This gives it a modernist, abstract feeling, detached from handwriting principles.
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Monotype released Joanna Nova in 2015 with a matching sans-serif design by Terrance Weinzierl, Joanna Sans Nova, intended to somewhat resemble Gill Sans but complement Joanna more closely, with a more normally slanted italic not solely inspired by either. The family includes 16 fonts in 8 weights and 2 weights, with complementary italics. Character set support includes W1G.
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Kinneir and Calvert's road signage redesign used a similar approach. Linotype and its designer Hermann Zapf, who had begun development on a planned Gill Sans competitor in 1955, first considered redrawing some letters to make it more like these faces before abandoning the design project (now named "Magnus") around 1962–3. An additional development which reduced Gill Sans' dominance was the arrival of phototypesetting, which allowed typefaces to be printed from photographs on film and (especially in display use – hot metal continued for some body text setting for longer) massively increased the range of typefaces that could cheaply be used. Dry transfers like Letraset had a similar effect for smaller projects; their sans- serif Compacta and Stephenson Blake's Impact exemplified the design trends of the period by choosing dense, industrial designs.
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The signature campaign typeface was Gotham, typically using capital letters with occasional use of the script Snell Roundhand. Gotham was designed in 2000 by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, originally for GQ magazine. Prior to Gotham, the campaign used the typeface Gill Sans in upper case and lower case. Another Hoefler and Frere-Jones font, Requiem, was used for the campaign logo.
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Released in 1968 and praised by Tschichold, it was intended to be a more dynamic, handwriting-influenced sans- serif form. Its italic is, however, more of an oblique than Gill's. Hypatia Sans, designed by Thomas Phinney and released by Adobe, was intended to be a more characterful humanist sans design. Many other fonts are influenced by Gill Sans to some extent.
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A modern sign at Leytonstone station, using Johnston. Vintage sign, from before the Johnston typeface was standardised, at West Brompton station. Johnston was originally printed using wood type for large signs and metal type for print. London Transport often did not use Johnston for general small printing, with many documents such as bus timetables using other typefaces such as Gill Sans and Granby.
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The small edition was sold for $450; like the deluxe edition, it was set in Monotype Gill Sans, but in single columns. It was printed on Mohawk Superfine text by the Sun Hill Press, with the reproduction of the etchings printed on a Canon laser printer. The edition was then Smythe sewn at Spectrum Bindery and enclosed in a solander box.
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Bliss on the University of Worcester logo. London G20 summit logo. Bliss is a humanist sans-serif typeface family designed by Jeremy Tankard. Bliss is a design in the British humanist style, based on the Johnston typeface of London Underground as well as Gill Sans and Syntax, but with a more uniform style with greater evenness and similarity between weights.
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Frutiger is an amalgamation of Univers tempered with organic influences of the Gill Sans, a humanist sans-serif typeface by Eric Gill, Edward Johnston's type for the London Transport, and Roger Excoffon's Antique Olive: like Univers it uses a single-story 'g', unlike the double of Gill Sans, and has square dots on the letters, but has a generally humanist design with wide apertures to increase legibility, decided on after legibility research. In the 1970s, Frutiger designed , a wedge-serif design with mild stroke modulation, which has many similarities in basic letter structure to Frutiger, and in overall effect to Albertus. Frutiger's intention was more unusual: to create a design that could be modified by computer, through extreme slanting, morphing or changing stroke width, without seeming as if it had been distorted. Frutiger designed a number of other signage projects in the 1970s.
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Johnston (upper) and Gill Sans (lower), showing some of the most distinctive differences. In the regular or roman style of Gill Sans, some letters were simplified from Johnston, with diamond dots becoming round (rectangles in the later light weight) and the lower-case "L" becoming a simple line, but the "a" became more complex with a curving tail in most versions and sizes. In addition, the design was simply refined in general, for example by making the horizontals slightly narrower than verticals so that they do not appear unbalanced, a standard technique in font design which Johnston had not used. The "R" with its widely splayed leg is Gill's preferred design, unlike that of Johnston; historian James Mosley has suggested that this may be inspired by an Italian Renaissance carving in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
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One of the most extensive is Gillius, a derivative by the Arkandis Digital Foundry project and designer Hirwen Harendal, which includes bold, italic, condensed and condensed bold styles. It is not a pure clone, but rather partly created by modifying Bitstream Vera, and adds influences from geometric fonts particularly visible in the design of the "w". K22, a foundry in Quezon City operated by the designer "Toto G", has released two Gill Sans shadowed variants as K22 EricGill Shadow (digitising the Gill Sans Shadow 338 design) and K22 EricGill Shadow Line, an inline variant, for free for "personal, private and non- commercial purposes" and for sale for commercial use. A direct clone of the medium weight, Sans Guilt, was released by Brussels open source design group OSP in 2011, but it contains several obvious glitches such as misaligned "w" and "x" characters.
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Jonathan Hoefler was born on August 22, 1970, in New York City to Doreen Benjamin and Charles Hoefler, a theatrical set designer and producer. Growing up, it was the Gill Sans text on boxes of custard that drew him to typography design. He is largely self-taught, and worked with magazine art director Roger Black prior to forming the Hoefler Type Foundry in 1989.
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This is clearest in the "a", which becomes a "single storey" design similar to handwriting, and the lower-case "p", which has a calligraphic tail on the left reminiscent of italics such as those cut by William Caslon in the eighteenth century. The italic "e" is more restrained, with a straight line on the underside of the bowl where serif fonts normally add a curve. Like most serif fonts, several weights and releases of Gill Sans use ligatures to allow its expansive letter "f" to join up with or avoid colliding with following letters. The basic letter shapes of Gill Sans do not look consistent across styles (or even in the metal type era all the sizes of the same style), especially in Extra Bold and Extra Condensed widths, while the Ultra Bold style is effectively a different design altogether and was originally marketed as such.
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Digital- period Monotype designer Dan Rhatigan, author of an article on Gill Sans's development after Gill's death, has commented: "Gill Sans grew organically ... [it] takes a very 'asystematic' approach to type. Very characteristic of when it was designed and of when it was used." (At this time the idea that sans- serif typefaces should form a consistent family, with glyph shapes as consistent as possible between all weights and sizes, had not fully developed: it was quite normal for families to vary as seemed appropriate for their weight until developments such as the groundbreaking release of Univers in 1957.) In the light weights, the slanting cut at top left of the regular "t" is replaced with two separate strokes. From the bold weight upwards Gill Sans has an extremely eccentric design of "i" and "j" with the dots (tittles) smaller than their parent letter's stroke.
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Particular areas of thought during the design process were the "a" (several versions and sizes in the hot metal era had a straight tail like Johnston's or a mildly curving tail) and the "b", "d", "p" and "q", where some versions (and sizes, since the same weight would not be identical at every size) had stroke ends visible and others did not. Rhatigan has commented that Monotype's archives contain "enough [material] for a book just about the 'b', 'd', 'p', and 'q' of Gill Sans". The titling capitals of Gill Sans were first unveiled at a printing conference in 1928; it was also shown in a specimen issued in the Fleuron magazine edited by Morison. While initial response was partly appreciative, it was still considered dubious by some ultra-conservative printers who saw all sans-serif type as modern and unsound; one called it "typographical Bolshevism".
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Typefaces that became popular around this time included original early "grotesque" sans-serifs, as well as new and more elegant designs in the same style such as Helvetica and Univers. Mosley has commented that in 1960 "orders unexpectedly revived" for the old Monotype Grotesque design: "[it] represents, even more evocatively than Univers, the fresh revolutionary breeze that began to blow through typography in the early sixties." He added in 2007 "its rather clumsy design seems to have been one of the chief attractions to iconoclastic designers tired of the ... prettiness of Gill Sans". As an example of this trend, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert's corporate rebranding of BR as British Rail in 1965 introduced Helvetica and Univers for printed matter and the custom but very similar Rail Alphabet for signage, and abandoned the classical, all caps signage style with which Gill Sans is often associated.
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More distantly, Arthur Vanson's Chesham Sans is inspired by the British tradition of sans-serif signpainting, with many similarities to Gill's work. Bitstream's Humanist 521 was an unofficial digitisation, to which its Russian licensee ParaType added a Cyrillic version in 1997. The companies SoftMaker and Fontsite also released Gill Sans digitisations under different names including 'Chantilly', 'Gibson' and others. More loosely, Syntax by Hans Eduard Meier is similar in some ways.
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LNER locomotive Mallard. Fascinated by railway engines since childhood, Eric Gill was immensely proud of the LNER's decision to standardise on his font. First unveiled in a single uppercase weight in 1928, Gill Sans achieved national prominence almost immediately, when it was chosen the following year to become the standard typeface by the LNER railway company, soon appearing on every facet of the company's identity, from metal locomotive nameplates and hand- painted station signage to printed restaurant car menus, timetables and advertising posters. The LNER promoted their rebranding by offering Gill (who was fascinated with railway engines) a footplate ride on the Flying Scotsman express service; he also painted for it a signboard in the style of Gill Sans, which survives in the collection of the St Bride Library. 1952 Jersey holiday events brochure, typical of the design style of the period In 1949 the Railway Executive decided on standard types of signs to be used at all stations.
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The category of humanist sans-serif typefaces, which Gill Sans helped to define, saw great attention during the 1980s and 1990s, especially as a reaction against the overwhelming popularity of Helvetica and Univers in the 1960s and 1970s. Modern sans-serif designs inspired by Gill often adapt the concept by creating a design better proportioned and spaced for body text, a wider and more homogeneous range of weights, something easier since the arrival of the computer due to the use of multiple master or interpolated font design, or more irregular and hand-drawn in style. Jeremy Tankard's Bliss and Volker Küster's Today Sans are modern variations; Tankard commented on the genre's eclipse that his aim was to create "the first commercial typeface with an English feel since Gill Sans". Rowton Sans is inspired by Gill but has a nearly upright italic, similar to that used by Gill in his serif font Joanna.
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One of the earliest humanist designs was Edward Johnston's Johnston typeface from 1916, and, a decade later, Gill Sans (Eric Gill, 1928). Edward Johnston, a calligrapher by profession, was inspired by classic letter forms, especially the capital letters on the Column of Trajan. Humanist designs vary more than gothic or geometric designs. Some humanist designs have stroke modulation (strokes that clearly vary in width along their line) or alternating thick and thin strokes.
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The idents all featured a numeral 2, with a view or scape behind it, as viewers looked through the 2. The new look also featured a new design of BBC Two logo. The previously purple box has now been turned a deep shade of aqua, very similar to the viridian used by the 1991 idents. The text has also been changed, with the 'TWO' font being changed to Avenir, from Gill Sans previously.
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The M7 Class was given the BR Power Classification of 2P upon Nationalisation. Livery remained Southern black, though two malachite locos which were painted soon after (numbers 30038/30244) were lettered for British Railways in yellow Gill Sans style along the sides of their tanks. This was eventually replaced with BR lined mixed traffic black livery. Numbering was initially that of the Southern, though for a period an "S" prefix was added to the number.
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Monotype was involved in the design and production of many typefaces in the 20th century. Monotype developed many of the most widely used typeface designs, including Times New Roman, Gill Sans, Arial, Bembo and Albertus. Via acquisitions of Linotype GmbH, International Typeface Corporation, Bitstream Inc., FontShop, and URW Type Foundry, the company gained the rights to fonts including Helvetica, ITC Franklin Gothic, Optima, ITC Avant Garde, Palatino, FF DIN, and URW Grotesk.
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International Typeface Corporation released a variant in 1999 called ITC Johnston. It originally included three font weights like New Johnston, however it does not include the hooked 1 and uses side-pointed 4. In November 2002, the typeface was rereleased in OpenType format, which also expanded the font family to include italic fonts (resembling those of Gill Sans) in all weights. OpenType features include alternates, case forms, small caps (romans only), old style figure.
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Some of his typeface designs such as FF Disturbance and Blue Island are experimental and based on distorting the alphabet, through a unicase design in Disturbance and the use of ligatures to connect letters in unexpected ways in Blue Island. Tankard’s Bliss design, used by Amazon, is more traditional and loosely based on humanist sans-serif designs such as Johnston, Gill Sans and Syntax. Tankard studied at the Royal College of Art.
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Charlotte Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Michael Gills in 1992 as part of a larger family called Charlotte, which includes a related serif text face. The face was designed for Letraset. Charlotte Sans bears comparison with Eric Gill's 1927 face Gill Sans, sharing several humanist sans-serif characteristics: a double-story roman a and g, and a single-story lowercase italic a. Charlotte Sans has a tapered glyphic stroke in the t.
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The 'a' is double- storey. Early fonts have a double-storey 'g' following British tradition and 215 and 216 a single-storey 'g' on the German model. Monotype Grotesque was somewhat overshadowed from the late 1920s due to the arrival of new sans- serifs such as Kabel, Futura and Gill Sans, also by Monotype. With their cleaner, more constructed and geometric appearance, these designs came to define graphic design of the 1930s, especially in Britain and parts of Europe.
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These include most popularly Hermann Zapf's Optima (1958), a typeface expressly designed to be suitable for both display and body text. Some humanist designs may be more geometric, as in Gill Sans and Johnston (especially their capitals), which like Roman capitals are often based on perfect squares, half-squares and circles, with considerable variation in width. These somewhat architectural designs may feel too stiff for body text. Others such as Syntax, Goudy Sans and Sassoon Sans more resemble handwriting, serif fonts or calligraphy.
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FF Scala Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Dutch designer Martin Majoor in 1993 for the Vredenburg Music Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It was designed as a companion to Majoor's earlier serif old style typeface FF Scala, designed in 1990. Like Eric Gill's 1927–30 design Gill Sans and Hans Eduard Meier's typeface Syntax, both upper and lower case are structurally modeled on serif old style faces. The lowercase roman a and g are two-story.
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Coaching stock was painted in an overall Dark Lake (a dark red colour) with 'straw' lining. The carriage lettering was in Gill Sans, in gold shaded to the right and below in red, and to the lower left in dark grey, to imitate the reflection of the paint work on an embossed letter. There are very few of these coaches left, and none are in service. Coach No.163 is (2017) undergoing restoration at Hampton Loade railway station on the Severn Valley Railway.
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Sans-serifs were still regarded as vulgar and commercial by purists in this period: Johnston's pupil Graily Hewitt privately commented of them that: > In Johnston I have lost confidence. Despite all he did for us ... he has > undone too much by forsaking his standard of the Roman alphabet, giving the > world, without safeguard or explanation, his block letters which disfigure > our modern life. His prestige has obscured their vulgarity and > commercialism. Nonetheless, Gill Sans rapidly became popular after its release.
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As described above, Linotype began work in 1955 on a Gill Sans competitor, intended to be named 'Magnus'. Designed by the German type designer Hermann Zapf with input from British Linotype manager Walter Tracy, the design was ultimately abandoned by 1963 for reasons of lack of manufacturing capacity and changing tastes, although it too reached test proofs. Lowestoft Central station in British Railways standard lettering. The right-hand side of the legs of the "R"s are straight rather than Gill's smooth curve.
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Working with Morison, Warde produced materials and lectures that connected British nationalist sentiment to the visual identity of corporations and functionalist views of efficiency. This kind of promotional activity aligned the political and public intentions of Jan Tschichold's New, or Modern typography, with the goals of business. With the tenet of readability being a key benefit of good typography, Warde worked with Eric Gill to launch and promote Gill Sans. Warde penned her famous broadside "This is a Printing Office", to show the Perpetua typeface off.
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The same font found its way into the Rosetta-derived writing recognition system in Mac OS X—Inkwell. The TrueType font can be made available to any application by copying the font file, which is embedded in a system component, to any font folder. (See List of fonts in Mac OS X for more information.) The Newton logo featured the Gill Sans typeface, which was also used for the Newton keyboard. Espy Sans was later used as the font for Apple's eWorld online service in 1994.
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While never as popular as Gill Sans on the commercial market, Granby nonetheless remained in use with revivals in phototypesetting and digital versions. A digitisation of some weights is sold by Elsner+Flake and Scangraphic; Red Rooster Fonts has also digitised the Elephant style. It was appropriately used in adverts by the London company Granby Cycles in the 1930s. Wayfarer, by Jeremy Tankard, is a loose revival of the condensed style, commissioned by Sheffield City Council as their corporate font based on its local heritage.
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The clock was originally placed to the left hand side of the channel name though following complaints that this could only be viewed in widescreen, it was moved to the right in February 2007. Bulletins on BBC World News and BBC One also introduced similar graphics and title sequences on the same day. In 2008, the graphics were again relaunched, using the style introduced in 2007 and a new colour scheme. The typeface of the on-screen text was changed from Helvetica to Gill Sans.
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In the 1960s, Leo Maggs was working at the Hazell Sun Group's design studio in Covent Garden, London. At that time, he was commanded to create a futuristic style title for an article of About the House (the magazine of The Friends of Covent Garden Opera House). Maggs based the letters of that title on the MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) system, E-13B, used on bank cheques. He then continued to design the rest of the letters of the alphabet in his spare time, basing their proportions on that of the Gill Sans typeface.
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According to Mike Ashworth of Transport for London, London Transport itself made some use of Granby by the 1960s due to the limited availability of Johnston type. Granby Elephant compared to Monotype's Gill Kayo, also called Gill Sans Ultra Bold. Several styles of Granby were released to extend the design, including condensed weights, an inlined style and 'Granby Elephant', an ultra-bold design. As with many sans-serifs, rather than a true italic, an oblique was offered, in which the letters were slanted but not altered to take on more handwriting influences.
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Milne returned to the GWR as assistant general manager (to Sir Felix Pole) in 1922, and replaced Pole as General Manager in 1929. He continued Pole's work on the GWR's advertising and corporate image, introducing the Gill Sans typeface in advertising and the GWR monogram on advertising and rolling stock. He was knighted in 1932, and appointed Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO) in 1936. During his tenure he helped set up Railway Air Services, a joint venture between the major British railway companies and Imperial Airways.
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The class was absorbed by British Railways in 1948, and like their N class counterparts were given the power classification 4MT in 1949. Under British Railways ownership, the class was reclassified from 4MT to 4P5FB in 1953; the "B" denoting the brake power rating when used on unfitted (non- vacuum braked) goods trains.Langston (2008), p. 108 The locomotives at first retained their Southern Railway livery, but No. 1876 was the first locomotive to emerge from Ashford works with "British Railways" painted on the tender in Gill Sans lettering.
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The story takes place over the four years Steve is in high school. The narrative is interlaced between his senior year in San Diego, California and flashbacks to his freshman to junior years in Houston, Texas. The time described in Houston is supposedly the 100-page essay written by Steve as his extra English class necessary for graduation. To set off the different parts of the story Steve's time in Houston is presented in Gill Sans sans-serif typeface while his time in San Diego is shown in Industria.
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Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. .. He reportedly had doubts about the artistic ambitions of Monotype's artistic adviser Stanley Morison and publicity manager Beatrice Warde, complaining in one 1920s memo of the Gill Sans typeface, then in development, that "I see nothing in this design to recommend it and much that is objectionable." In his spare time Pierpont enjoyed growing roses. He retired as Works Manager in 1936 and became Consulting Engineer with a seat on the board, an occasion marked by a dinner at the Savoy Hotel, but died the following year.
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Antique Olive is a humanist sans-serif typeface ("antique" being equivalent to sans-serif in French typographic conventions). Along the lines of Gill Sans, it was designed in the early 1960s by French typographer Roger Excoffon, an art director and former consultant to the Marseilles based Fonderie Olive.Provan, Archie, and Alexander S. Lawson, 100 Type Histories (volume 1), National Composition Association, Arlington, Virginia, 1983. pp. 16-17. In addition to a basic weight, Antique Olive was produced in medium, condensed, wide, bold, condensed bold, extra bold (known as Antique Olive Compact), and ultra bold (known as Nord).
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Under Tschichold the covers included the use of Eric Gill's Gill Sans typeface, which he was careful to have spaced evenly. According to Tschichold establishing this quality was not immediately embraced by the compositors; “Every day I had to wade through miles of corrections (often ten books daily). I had a rubber stamp made: ‘Equalize letter-spaces according to their visual value.’ It was totally ignored; the hand compositors continued to space out the capitals on title-pages (where optical spacing is essential) with spaces of equal thickness.”Richard Doubleday, "Jan Tschichold at Penguin Books: A Resurgance [sic] of Classical Book Design" (PDF).
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Gill argued in his Essay on Typography that such closed-up forms were counterproductively bold, less legible than lighter fonts of normal proportions. Morison commissioned Gill to develop Gill Sans after they had begun to work together (often by post since Gill lived in Wales) on Gill's serif design Perpetua from 1925 onwards; they had known each other since about 1913. Morison visited Cleverdon's bookshop while in Bristol in 1927 where he saw and was impressed by Gill's fascia and alphabet. Gill wrote that "it was as a consequence of seeing these letters" that Morison commissioned him to develop a sans-serif family.
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A further change occurred in 2008 when Transport for London removed the serif from the numeral '1' and also altered the '4', in both cases reverting them to their original appearance. New Johnston's numerals are originally designed to fit for setting tabular matters, which was requested by TfL. As a proprietary typeface (one of the first ever), Johnston did not become commercially available in metal type. However, capitalising on the popularity of the design style after Gill Sans had become popular, the typefounders Stephenson Blake, who cast the Johnston metal type, created a similar but not identical design, Granby for sale.
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Marr returned to The Independent as the newspaper's political editor in 1992, and became its editor in 1996 during a particularly turbulent time at the paper. Faced with price cutting by the Murdoch-owned Times, sales had begun to decline, and Marr made two attempts to arrest the slide. He made use of bold 'poster-style' front pages, and then in 1996 radically re-designed the paper along a mainland European model, with Gill Sans headline fonts, and stories being grouped together by subject matter, rather than according to strict news value. This tinkering ultimately proved disastrous.
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Many reduced the eccentricities of Kabel and in particular made it more resemble Futura, which was very dominant in printing of the period. (This offering of Futura-like alternates such as a single-storey ‘a’, which historian Paul Shaw has called a "Futura-ectomy", was common among other sans-serifs of the time, including Monotype's Gill Sans, Linotype's Metro and Erbar.) Originally released by the Gebr. Klingspor Foundry, the design continued to be made available by the Stempel Foundry (which bought Klingspor in 1956, having already owned some shares) and briefly for phototypesetting systems. Linotype continues to sell Kabel in digital format.
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The cake lasted 13 years before being replaced on 20 April 1998, by adapting a version of the idents used by Carlton who had been using since 25 November 1996. This featured the name Central in the font Gill Sans in centre screen against a bright and colourful background. The idents featured a 2D animation of either the letters interacting in some way, a letter being replaced with another object, or the word being part of a larger scene, such as a cross word of place names in the region. The look was discontinued on 5 September 1999.
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Impressed by the quality of the Roissy airport signage, the typographical director of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company approached Frutiger in 1974 to turn it into a typeface for print. In designing the typeface's predecessors Concorde and Roissy, Frutiger's goal had been to create a sans-serif typeface with the rationality and cleanliness of Univers but the organic and proportional aspects of Gill Sans. According to Frutiger, "What was important, was total clarity – I would even call it nudity – an absence of any kind of artistic addition." Designing Frutiger as a print version of Roissy, this principle resulted in a distinctive and legible typeface.
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Gill Sans on the nameplate of a 4468 Mallard locomotive (built in 1938). It was marketed as a sophisticated refinement of earlier sans-serifs, taking inspiration from Roman capitals and designer Eric Gill's experience carving monuments and memorials. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sans-serif types were viewed with suspicion by many printers, especially those of fine book printing, as being fit only for advertisements (if that), and to this day most books remain printed in serif fonts as body text. This impression would not have been helped by the standard of common sans-serif types of the period, many of which now seem somewhat lumpy and eccentrically-shaped.
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The album cover, designed by Richey Edwards while hospitalised, features a triptych by Jenny Saville depicting three perspectives on the body of an obese woman in her underwear, and is titled Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face). Saville gave her permission for use of her work for free after a discussion with Edwards in which he described each song on the album. The back cover features a photo of the band in military uniforms and a quote taken from Octave Mirbeau's book The Torture Garden. This album is also the first instance of the Manic Street Preachers using Gill Sans typeface with a reversed "R" in their album art.
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Electra with cursive After establishing a career as a lettering artist and book designer, Dwiggins was hired as a consultant by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in 1929 and established a partnership with its head of type design Chauncey H. Griffith, who would manage the production of all his typefaces for the rest of his career. Dwiggins's first typeface was Metro, a sans-serif intended as an answer to new European faces such as Futura and Gill Sans, which were experiencing a vogue. oblique. A more conventional italic was later added. After Metro, Dwiggins set out to design a serif book typeface for long-form reading.
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From the outset, design was essential to the success of the Penguin brand. Avoiding the illustrated gaudiness of other paperback publishers, Penguin opted for the simple appearance of three horizontal bands, the upper and lower of which were colour-coded according to which series the title belonged to; this is sometimes referred to as the horizontal grid. In the central white panel, the author and title were printed in Gill Sans and in the upper band was a cartouche with the legend "Penguin Books". The initial design was created by the then 21-year-old office junior Edward Young, who also drew the first version of the Penguin logo.
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Distinctive characters of Gill Sans. The influence of traditional serif letters is also clear in the "two-storey" lower-case "a" and "g", unlike that of Futura, and the "t" with its curve to bottom right and slanting cut at top left, unlike Futura's which is simply formed from two straight lines. The lower-case "a" also narrows strikingly towards the top of its loop, a common feature of serif designs but rarer in sans-serifs. Following the traditional serif model the italic has different letterforms from the roman, where many sans-serifs simply slant the letters in what is called an oblique style.
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In the phototype period Monotype continued to offer two or three sizes of master, but all of this subtlety was lost on transfer to digital. To replicate this, it is necessary to make manual adjustment to spacing to compensate for size changes, such as expanding the spacing and increasing the weight used at smaller sizes. Former ATypI president John Berry commented of Gill Sans' modernised spacing that "both the regular weight and especially the light weight look much better when they're tracked loose". In contrast, Walter Tracy wrote in 1986 that he preferred the later spacing: "the metal version ... was spaced, I suspect, as if it were a serif face".
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Other users included Penguin Books' iconic paperback jacket designs from 1935 and British official mapping agency Ordnance Survey. It was also used by London Transport for documents which could not be practically set in Johnston. Paul Shaw, a historian of printing, has described it as a key element of the 'Modernist classical' style from the 1930s to the 1950s, that promoted clean, spare design, often with all-capitals and centred setting of headings. Gill Sans remains popular, although a trend away from it towards grotesque and neo- grotesque typefaces took place around the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of continental and American design.
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It also included a "Granby Elephant" weight influenced by Gill Kayo. Another similar but more eccentric design was created by Johnston's student Harold Curwen for the use of his family company, the Curwen Press of Plaistow. Named "Curwen Sans" or "Curwen Modern", it has many similarities to Johnston also, and was occasionally used by London Transport in work printed by the Curwen Press. Curwen described it as based on his time studying with Johnston in the 1900s, although it was not cut into metal until 1928, around the same time as Gill Sans was released, with a lower-case similar to that of Kabel.
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A lightly customised Gill Sans on a 1935 Monotype typesetter keyboard A logical extension of the humanist sans-serif concept is the font superfamily: a serif font and a matching humanist sans-serif with similar letterforms. Martin Majoor's FF Scala Sans is a popular example of this influenced by Gill's work; others include Charlotte Sans and Serif by Michael Gills for Letraset, Mr and Mrs Eaves by Zuzana Licko, are based on Baskerville, and Dover Sans and serif by Robin Mientjes, based on Caslon. Monotype itself released Joanna Sans in 2015, as a screen-optimised sans-serif font intended to complement (but not exactly match) Gill's serif design Joanna.
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The logo now had the BBC blocks, with "Prime" in all capitals in the Gill Sans font next to it. The idents start with epileptic water scenes with full of colours, before settling on the main part of the ident, which features the water in a blue to orange gradient with ripples, and two marbles reflected and inverted by each other, with the logo being placed in the bottom. In December 2000, BBC Prime rebranded again. The idents now featured cartoon draws of famous UK sights, like the Big Ben, the Tower Bridge or the Stonehenge, shooting fireworks, followed by the looped, 15-second long sequence with exploding firework animations.
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Monotype also produced Series 727, in which the heavier strokes of upper-case letters were made slightly thinner. This was done to produce a lighter effect in which capital letters do not stand out so much, and was particularly intended for German use, since in the German language capitals are far more common since they appear at the start of each noun. Series 827 modified some letters (notably the R) to correspond to their appearance in other typefaces popular in French printing. This production of what are now called stylistic alternates to suit national tastes was common at the time, and many alternates were also offered for Gill Sans for use in Europe.
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The primary focus of Levien's work and research is in the varied areas regarding the theory of imaging—that is, rendering pictures and fonts for electronic display, which in addition to being aesthetically and mathematically important also contribute to the accessibility and search-openness of the web. Levien has written several papers documenting his research in halftoning technology, which have been implemented in the Gimp-Print free software package, as well as by several commercial implementations. He also created Gill, the GNOME desktop illustration application which aimed at supporting the W3C SVG standard for Vector Graphics. He states it was named after Eric Gill, the English type designer responsible for the Gill Sans, Perpetua and Joanna fonts.
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Eric Gill's artwork for the capitals of Solus, showing an alternative 'M' at bottom right similar to that of Gill Sans. Solus is a serif typeface that was designed by English sculptor and stonemason Eric Gill for the British Monotype Corporation and released in 1929. Solus has a structure of straight, regular serifs reminiscent of slab-serif typefaces of the nineteenth century, but with a reduced build giving an impression of crispness. Along with these characteristics, Solus bears the distinct personality of Gill's characteristic preferences in letterforms, such as the pointed end to the top left of the letter 'a'. James Mosley describes Solus as "essentially a mechanistic type — a ‘light Egyptian’", a conclusion also reached by editor Robert Harling in his book on Gill's work.
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The same type and illustrations (also done by Gill) for that book subsequently appeared in the journal on printing Fleuron (number 7) which was edited by Morison and printed in 1930; Gill Sans was also promoted in an issue of it. Also set in Perpetua and published in 1929 was Gill's Art Nonsense and Other Essays. While some sources give Perpetua a release date of 1929 based on these early uses, Perpetua was not to enter full commercial sale until 1932. Once on sale, it was sold for Monotype's typesetting machines, which cast metal type under the control of a keyboard, and also sometimes offered in metal type for hand-setting for the use of larger sizes and smaller printers.
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In 1922, master printer Daniel Berkeley Updike described sans-serif fonts as having "no place in any artistically respectable composing-room." By 1937 he stated that he saw no need to change this opinion in general, though he felt that Gill Sans and Futura were the best choices if sans-serifs had to be used. Through the early twentieth century, an increase in popularity of sans-serif fonts took place as more artistic sans-serif designs were released. While he disliked sans-serif fonts in general, the American printer J.L. Frazier wrote of Copperplate Gothic in 1925 that "a certain dignity of effect accompanies...due to the absence of anything in the way of frills," making it a popular choice for the stationery of professionals such as lawyers and doctors.
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Alibi logo used 2008 to 2015 When the channel launched on 1 November 1997, the idents featured a star shape, usually inside a circle, with the UK Arena logo below. The logo, like that of all the UKTV channels until 2001, featured a single straight line logo with the UK prefix in a white box and the channel name typed in Gill Sans above a line extending out from the box. When the channel rebranded to UK Drama on 31 March 2000, the idents remained the same, with a change of the colours and the logo the only noticeable differences. A new design introduced on 7 May 2001 resulted in the UK Drama logo standing alone at the bottom of the screen in a bold text, stylised to appear as: "UK Drama".
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Gill Sans was released in 1928 by Monotype, initially as a set of titling capitals that was quickly followed by a lower-case. Gill's aim was to blend the influences of Johnston, classic serif typefaces and Roman inscriptions to create a design that looked both cleanly modern and classical at the same time. Marketed by Monotype as a design of "classic simplicity and real beauty", it was intended as a display typeface that could be used for posters and advertisements, as well as for the text of documents that need to be clearly legible at small sizes or from a distance, such as book blurbs, timetables and price lists. Designed before setting documents entirely in sans-serif text was common, its standard weight is noticeably bolder than most modern body text fonts.
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The diagrams were then used as a plan for machining metal punches by pantograph to stamp matrices, which would be loaded into a casting machine to cast type. It was Monotype's standard practice at the time to first engrave a limited number of characters and print proofs (some of which survive) from them to test overall balance of colour and spacing on the page, before completing the remaining characters. Walter Tracy, Rhatigan and Gill's biographer Malcolm Yorke have all written that the drawing office's work in making Gill Sans successful has not been fully appreciated; Yorke described Gill as "tactless" in his claims that the design was "as much as possible mathematically measurable ... as little reliance as possible should be placed on the sensibility of the draughtsmen and others concerned in its machine facture".
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Explorer was created to portray a "adventurous personality", fitting in well with the association brand focusing on everyday adventure introduced in 2008, and building on the previous positioning of Explorer Scouts as being "Extreme, Challenging and Streetwise". In 2015, the Scout Association updated their visual identity style, including the section brands, to focus on the Scouting fleur-de-lis. As part of this, the new Explorer Scout logo was simplified to a navy blue wordmark with a small fleur- de-lis either located to the top right of the wordmark or a larger version located directly above the wordmark. The typeface for the wordmark was changed to Gill Sans, however this was not used in any other publication; instead TheSerif was used for headings in line with the rest of the association and Frutiger continued to be used for body text.
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Of the period from the 1930s to 1950s, when he was growing up, James Mosley would later write: > The Monotype classics dominated the typographical landscape ... in Britain, > at any rate, they were so ubiquitous that, while their excellent quality was > undeniable, it was possible to be bored by them and to begin to rebel > against the bland good taste that they represented. In fact we were already > aware by 1960 that they might not be around to bore us for too long. The > death of metal type ... seemed at last to be happening. While extremely popular in Britain, and to a lesser extent in European printing, Gill Sans did not achieve popularity with American printers in the hot metal era, with most preferring gothic designs like Franklin Gothic and geometric designs like Futura and Monotype's own Twentieth Century.
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The monochromatic etchings depict stylised chromosomes, a hallmark of Ashbaugh's work, accompanied by imagery of a pistol, camera or in some instances simple line drawings—all allusions to Gibson's contribution. The deluxe edition was set in Monotype Gill Sans at Golgonooza Letter Foundry, and printed on Rives heavyweight text by Begos and the Sun Hill Press. The final 60 pages of the book were then fused together, with a hollowed-out section cut into the centre, containing the self-erasing diskette on which the text of Gibson's poem was encrypted. The encryption was the work of a pseudonymous computer programmer, "BRASH", assisted by Electronic Frontier Foundation founders John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore. The deluxe edition was originally priced at US$1500 (later $2000), and each copy is unique to some degree because of handmade or hand-finished elements.
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Sans serif typefaces, increasingly used for body text, generally avoid ligatures, though notable exceptions include Gill Sans and Futura. Inexpensive phototypesetting machines in the 1970s (which did not require journeyman knowledge or training to operate) also generally avoid them. A few, however, became characters in their own right, see below the sections about German ß, various Latin accented letters, & et al.. The trend against digraph use was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution starting around 1977 with the production of the Apple II. Early computer software in particular had no way to allow for ligature substitution (the automatic use of ligatures where appropriate), while most new digital typefaces did not include ligatures. As most of the early PC development was designed for the English language (which already treated ligatures as optional at best) dependence on ligatures did not carry over to digital.
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