They looked at other possibilities, not least another German face called , an early sans serif from the end of the nineteenth century. One contemporary designer has described Akzidenz as being ‘both approachable and aggressive at the same time,’ which may be just the qualities one demands of a sign: the clear type reads well from a distance but its thin, consistent and rather monotone letters don’t detain the imagination long.
In Britain and America, was usually called Standard, a suitable name for something with such little personality. It was to become a key inspiration for both Univers and Helvetica, but its main use in the first half of the twentieth century was for trade catalogues and price lists. It is one of the most significant faces without the name of a recognized designer attached, seemingly being designed by committee at the Berthold foundry, before being modernized and enlarged in the 1950s by Günter Gerhard Lange.
Akzidenz Grotesk – ‘approachable and aggressive’
The new alphabet developed by Kinneir and Calvert would soon have a name – Transport – and its features would guide drivers all over the world, not least the curve on the end of the l (borrowed from Johnston), and the obliquely cut curved strokes of the letters a, c, e, f, g, j, s, t and y. The letterforms were specifically designed to enable drivers to read place names as swiftly as possible, and the duo had found a simple truth: word recognition was easier and faster when upper and lower case combined. This wasn’t just a question of legibility; we seldom read an entire word before comprehending it, and skimming is easier when the letters flow as they do in a book. But the letters were only half the battle; it was their exact use on signs that would be just as challenging.
The pair made numerous presentations to members of the Road Research Laboratory and men from the Department of Transport, and they spoke of such things as the impact of headlights and halation, the light-flooding effect that meant that white-on-black letters should be slightly thinner than black-on-white. They agreed that the signs should be able to display all their information from 600 feet away. They also discussed colour. Calvert remembers a visit by Sir Hugh Casson, the architect considered to be Britain’s leading design expert, who suggested the signs should be ‘as dark as old dinner jackets’. Instead they drew influence from the United States, settling for white letters on American Standard Interstate Blue.
When the weather permitted, Kinneir and Calvert moved out of their Knightsbridge office and placed their prototype signs in the courtyard outside and against tree trunks in Hyde Park; and then they walked slowly away from them, establishing relative reading distances. Their signs were tested on the Preston Bypass, and swiftly became as much a part of the landscape as disappearing trees and new Little Chefs. Not long after the first section of the M1 motorway opened in 1959, the big blue slabs of information proved so effective that nobody gave them a second glance.
But soon there would be another major problem to deal with – the signage and typography of Britain’s ordinary roads, the subject of another heavyweight Department of Transport committee. This was something that had not been successfully addressed since the Romans scratched Londinium in soft stone pillars.
In July 1961, the typographer Herbert Spencer took a twenty-mile journey from Marble Arch to what was then called London Airport at Heathrow. He took his camera along, and published the results in a lavish essay in his periodical Typographica. He wasn’t expecting to be impressed by design unity and a perfect choice of type, but he was surprised by the complete chaos of signs he encountered, which he described as ‘an extraordinary barrage of prose’ confronting drivers with as much text as a novel. The signs were ‘prohibitory, mandatory, directional, informative or warning … a remarkable demonstration of literary and graphic inventiveness in a field where discipline and restraint would be more appropriate and less dangerous.’
Spencer, who would later become a colleague of Margaret Calvert at the Royal College of Art, was a champion of modernity, and an enthusiast for the asymmetrical typography advanced by Jan Tschichold in Munich and the fluency and clarity of sans serif experiments of the Bauhaus. His horror at London’s street signs provoked editorials in the Guardian and Times Literary Supplement, and almost certainly came to the attention of the Worboys Committee, the transport group charged with producing a more user-friendly system. Jock Kinneir was the obvious choice for this work, but his proposals – Transport type again, but now white on green with yellow numerals for A-routes and black on white for B-routes, designed around a strict set of rules based on a tiling system – did not go unopposed.
The drive-by testing of transport fonts
Another designer, David Kindersley, believed they were muscling in on his patch. Kindersley had been thinking about alphabets and spacing for many years, and had done titling work for the Shell Film Unit. He had produced a more traditional serif alphabet for local road signs that took up less space despite being all capitals. But times were changing: his MOT Serif font was a reassuring companion on the road to Datchet or Windsor, but it didn’t look as if it would withstand the increasingly scientific rigours of the road research labs.
The key to Kinneir and Calvert’s work was careful letter-spacing on a tiling system without the loss of word-shape. As with the motorway signs, the whole system was designed from the driver’s point of view. ‘The key is ensuring that one has time to react accordingly,’ Calvert explains. ‘It’s about word recognition rather than requiring a driver to read each letter in a word. Jock would say it was like a Seurat pointillist painting. I always compared it to the Rembrandt portraits in Amsterdam: if you’re close up it doesn’t make any sense but it all comes together at the appropriate reading distance.’ Moreover, the Kinneir/Calvert system combined a universal amalgamation of words, numbers, directions and pictograms, a package closer to satellite navigation displays than it was to Kindersley’s beautifully wrought letter theories.
The clash of theories between Kindersley and Kinneir/ Calvert turned to open conflict, with angry letters to The Times. It increasingly looked as if Kindersley objected not only to the new look but also to being usurped by two relative upstarts. The battle was really between the old world and the new, the serif and the sans. Kindersley was a calligrapher and master stonemason, a pupil of Eric Gill, a believer in the ethics of the workshop, a man who liked traditional letter-spacing and exhibited his skill nowhere better than in his carving for the American War Cemetery near Cambridge. What he didn’t necessarily like was the Swiss style of clean efficiency that Kinneir and Calvert were both edging towards. There was only one way to solve their conflict: there would be a duel.
The way it almost looked: David Kindersley’s proposed sign lettering (above) and an early version of the lower-case sans serif Kinneir/Calvert design that won the day.
A testing area was set up at Benson Airport, the RAF base in Oxfordshire. ‘They got several airmen to sit in chairs on a platform,’ Calvert remembers, ‘and on the top of an old Ford Anglia they’d fixed these test signs with just two destinations on them, and they drove them towards these airmen and they had to say which ones they could see or read first.’ Kindersley’s was found to be slightly more legible (‘Three per cent!’ Calvert says. ‘A negligible amount!’). But on aesthetic grounds the committee wasn’t in any doubt which lettering they preferred.
After Transport, Margaret Calvert worked on a new face for Britain’s NHS hospitals, based on Helvetica, which she later adapted for British Rail (British Rail Alphabet) and then all BAA airports. Jock Kinneir died in 1994, David Kindersley the following year. Now in her seventies, Margaret Calvert regrets the encroaching sloppiness and proliferation of present-day signage, although she is pleased that her contribution to the original work is being recognized. ‘It’s funny how it swings around,’ she says. ‘It used to be that Jock got all the credit, now it’s me. According to some people I’ve signposted the world, which of course is ridiculous.’
Her name will live on for another reason, too. In the 1970s Kinneir and Cal
vert had won a competition to design all the graphics and communications for a new town in France, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Calvert remembers being bored, by this time, with sans serif letterforms such as Gill Sans and Helvetica, and, wanting something with a French feel, she started experimenting with serif fonts.
The face she came up with looked a little like the slab-serif Egyptian fonts from the early nineteenth century, sturdy but full of vitality, but the French rejected it, saying it looked too English. Then it found another use. An entire communications system was required for the Tyne and Wear Metro, and the new slab serif seemed to sit equally well with Newcastle’s monumental architectural history. The name Metro was already taken, so when the new face was made available as a digital typeface, Monotype called it . Rather fittingly, it is today resplendent in stainless-steel letters outside the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, not far from the spot where Kinneir and Calvert used to try out the road signs more than fifty years before.
Most of us are type designers from birth. We begin scribbling as toddlers, the most freedom we will ever have. Then we conform to a style, we raise the pen above and below the dotted line, we are rewarded for good copying. In Britain, the classic teachers of how to write, followed by the twentieth century’s children and their teachers, were Marion Richardson and Tom Gourdie – the latter, the author of the Ladybird Book of Handwriting. ‘The writer should be seated comfortably,’ Gourdie instructed us all, ‘feet flat on the floor and the desk sloping slightly … The forefinger should rest on the pencil about one-and-a-half inches from the point, and should point into the paper at an angle of 45 degrees.’ All sound advice for the child equipped with a ‘Black Prince pencil, or Platignum fountain pen with medium nib’.
Gourdie, whose work had an international following, was awarded an MBE in the 1970s, when the biggest enemy of beautiful handwriting was not the computer, but the Biro. ‘The ball point pen is most emphatically discouraged,’ he wrote. With only minor adjustments, his principles hold firm today. At the very start, Gourdie directs the young hand away from drawing letters, and displays merely strokes, circles and jagged edges. Then there are exercises for the ‘clockwise’ letters m, n, h, k, b, p and r, followed by the anti-clockwise (all the others). First names were used as a good way of using all the letters together: George, Hugh, Ian, James, Kate. The letters were then joined up, the loops on the bottom of the t and the top of the r found their purpose in tea, toe, rope and ride, which led to the most important exercise of all, the sandwiching of n between pairs of identical letters: ana, bnb, cnc, dnd. The verse Gourdie used to bring everything together in a tender italic at the end was:
Tom Gourdie demonstrating handwriting principles
One, two, three, four, five
Once I caught a fish alive
And once you had mastered that, it was time to get a John Bull Printing Outfit for your birthday.
The John Bull set – a typographic outlet for kids for forty years from its launch in the 1930s – contained tweezers, rubber letters, a wooden or plastic stamping rack to mount them on, and ink pad and paper. This kit was the fifteenth-century Gutenberg Bible writ small and smudgy – movable type to be used and reused until the tiny letters got lost in the carpet. The sets ranged from the compact unnumbered original to No 155, the larger numbers also containing rubber picture stamps. (The numbers were seemingly chosen at random: there was no No 11, for instance, and the larger numbers didn’t necessarily promise a bigger box or better things.)
The instructions for Outfit No 4 explained how to be your own Caxton, and it wasn’t complicated. ‘Separate the India-rubber type carefully. The letters are merely pressed into the holder. When the word or sentence is complete see that the face of the type is level. To print, carefully ink type on the pad … Should pad dry, damp the surface with a little water.’ Was there a child in the land who couldn’t grasp these principles? And was there one who didn’t use their own name for their very first words?
Careful now, keep it level – the John Bull Printing Outfit, 1950s wooden version
This was a wonderful British product, and not just by name. John Bull – stout, reliable, red-faced – was an emblem of olde stoicism and resistance. If he wasn’t on your packet of plump pork sausages he was on your frothing Toby jug, holding the nation up by his britches while the dog by his side looked unstrokable. The Printing Outfit was the perfect inter-war product, supporting both the toy and the rubber industries. The makers of Quink ink did okay from it too, parents loved it because it was educational, and children kept using it because they could construct rude words and secret messages over and over. We were making something, and in any self-respecting middle-class family of the 1960s it was there with the Spirograph as proud objects of reusable creativity.
Just the mention of it may send a grown man to eBay, though few would go to the extreme of artist John Gillett, who mounted a show at the Bracknell Gallery in Berkshire in 2004 called John Bull War and Peace, in which he showed a video of him tweezering his way through Tolstoy’s classic. Gillett didn’t really print the whole book, but he was making a point about how long art takes to make. A few years later, Stephen Fry used Printing Outfit No 30 at the start of his compelling BBC TV film about Gutenberg.
The John Bull kit didn’t teach you how to spell, and it didn’t tell you much about typefaces, but it was the handling and appreciation of letters that was important, a hands-on introduction to something that could be useful in later life.
More useful but less fun was the American manufactured Dymo label maker, a crunchy piece of plastic everyone could use to put their name on things that might be stolen. The operation took a while, and some strength: you threaded a loop of thin sticky tape onto a stamping plate, lined up a letter in a wheel, and squeezed a lever to emboss it in white. After a few minutes of twisting and pressing and cutting you had a word or two, which you could then put on books and files and LP sleeves. Then there were two possible outcomes: the labels would fall off and refuse adhesion thereafter, or they would stick so well that the surface of your possessions would be ruined forever.
Dymo – an invention that stuck … sometimes
Dymo set up business in California in 1958 and somehow the company still exists, although the modern machines have little motors and self-adhesive stickers. The original contraptions offered only one typeface with variety introduced by different-coloured tape reels.
The world of personal printing changed completely with Letraset. This was not just a party invitation tool, nor a kid’s toy, but a major part of the international graphic design industry. It was also the first time anyone outside the printing industry could choose a favourite font from the comfort of their desk, and the vast choice available introduced new words to common studio usage: Compacta, Pump, Premier Shaded, Octopus Shaded, Stack, Optex, Frankfurter, InterCity and Nice One Cyril. Letraset also created the first wave of ‘desktop publishing’, before the phrase existed. Letraset headings punctuated most of the punk fanzines and student press of the late 1970s and early 1980s, anticipating by a decade the liberation of computer DTP.
The Letraset company began in London in 1959, and by 1961 its founder Dai Davies had found a way to ‘liberate the letter’ from the restrictions of the letterpress and phototypesetting industries. No longer would magazine and poster designers, or engineers, schoolteachers and information managers, have to leave their regular place of work, run to the printers with a list of typeface names and empty space on their pages, and wait for a technician to make their headlines. Suddenly they were their own technicians, and they could be up all night rubbing until they ran out of the letter e.
Perfect technique – a Letraset expert at work
The technique was the Dry Transfer process, which entailed ‘burnishing’ (ie rubbing) a letter from a tacky sheet of plastic onto the desired surface until you got the whole thing on without creasing, and then repeating the exercise until you had a word that was (almost) straight. With patience it wa
s possible to master this, and the results could be satisfying. The system was frowned upon by the traditional typographic trades, whose workers treated it initially as risible, and then as a threat that wouldn’t go away. (Letraset was the dominant force in this hungry market, but it wasn’t the first rub-down process. The French got there first, the foundry Deberny & Peignot offering Typophane, sticky letters of their most famous types on a carrier film. But you had to cut out the letters individually before rubbing them, and their edges were often visible. Letraset simplified this process, and had one other great asset: relentless marketing.)
From a distance it is tricky to remember just how transformative Letraset was. It put a self-made lettering artist in every home or office, and it reshaped typography almost as much as hot metal compositing had done sixty-five years before. Its instruction sheet, keen not to be mistaken for something simple, adopted the faintly scientific air of a moon landing: ‘Burnish onto surface – the lettering will turn translucent as it is transferred from the carrier sheet.’
Wonky Letraset heading and dodgy typewriter ribbon – a winning combination for punk fanzines and student mags
What remains? Some childhood nostalgia, a fleeting mention in the Arctic Monkeys song ‘Cornerstone’, and the sporadic reunions of those who thought they had found the future. Twenty years after its heyday in the mid-1970s, a group of stencil cutters from Letraset recalled their experiences for a booklet published by the St Bride Library with the ITC of New York, and their abiding vision was of an eccentric world much missed (at least by them). They recalled making special tools of wood sticks, Sellotape and razor blades to cut sheets of letters out of Ulano masking film, and they explained how difficult this method was, particularly if one wanted to avoid ‘the dreaded peanut’, a visible link between straight and curved cuts.
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