Letters of Credit 47

-90-

Aspects
of type design

Some characters from Eric Gill's

first drawing for the sans-serif

type. They were revised

in manufacture.

the illustrative posters for which the transport authority was
famous (a task I sometimes had to perform at the Baynard Press —
where, incidentally, the bold version of the face, a titling, was
drawn by Charles Pickering to notes provided by Johnston in
1929). The Johnston sans-serif did not actually become type -
wooden for the sizes 6-line pica up to 36-line, metal for the 36,48
and 60 point - until about 1922, when it was needed for
letterpress-printed information notices. It was in the lower sizes
that the defects in the lowercase were liable to become visible
and, to some eyes, irritating. In the late 1970s the Johnston face
was substantially reworked by a London design studio; but
because of the variety of sans-serif types that no w compete with it
on station poster sites the type no longer has the distinction it had
when it was introduced in 1916 and made such a superior con¬
trast to the plebeian 'grotesques' of the time.

The particular attitude to the task that Johnston adopted - the
belief that the letters should be based on the classic letter forms
developed in Rome - is more significant to the student than the
type itself, which remains a 'private' design, localised in the
London area. That attitude was given further expression in a type
that was by no means 'private' and so far from being localised
actually achieved a world-wide reputation, if not popularity.
This was the sans-serif type designed for Monotype by Eric Gill,
a friend of Johnston, and introduced in 1928. Gill's original
drawing for the type contained several unusual features. There
was the flat bottom to the lowercase d (it is also present in his
Perpetua roman), a feature that was repeated at the head of p and
q. And there was the shearing of the ends of the vertical strokes at
an angle - a device we shall meet again from other hands. Those
features may have been not just personal fancies but signs of a
conscientious desire to avoid imitating the Johnston face. They
disappeared in the course of development. (The design as it fin¬
ally emerged owes a good deal to the Monotype drawing office.)
The letters and numerals of the Gill sans-serif in its basic weight
are decidedly more stylish than those of the Johnston type. The
bold version is dull; but the extra-bold deserves its popularity. Its
numerals are particularly good. In its metal form the basic Gill
Sans had one slightly unsatisfactory feature. As noted in the essay
on spacing, its fitting was a little too loose for a sans-serif. In
some filmsetting versions the character spacing has been slightly
reduced, with a consequent improvement in the texture of the
type in text sizes.

The Johnston and Gill sans-serif did not come into existence as
the outcome of an artistic movement or campaign, but were
instigated, separately, by two remarkable men: Frank Pick, the
imaginative manager of the London transport system, who com¬
missioned Johnston two years before the formation of the Design
and Industries Association; and Stanley Morison, who saw typo-

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN

OPQRSTUVWXYZ

abcdefghijklmn

opqrstuvwxyz

Johnston and Gill Sans compared.

graphic possibility in Gill's sans-serif lettering on a shop front.
The causes and effects of sans-serif development were different in
Germany, where as early as 1907 two important events in the
history of industrial design occurred. The first was the formation
of the Deutsche Werkbund, an association of architects, crafts¬
men and (significantly) manufacturers. It held a notable exhi¬
bition in Cologne in 1914. The second event, also in 1907, was the
appointment by A E G, the great electrical combine, of Peter Beh¬
rens as their design consultant, the first of his kind. From those
two sources of design activity, and from the non-representational
theories of the constructivist movement amongst Russian artists,
there arose in 1919, the Bauhaus, that remarkable attempt to
synthesise the values of art, craft and the machine. In its printing
workshop constructivist principles were applied to typography: