The history of Gill Sans begins with Edward Johnston’s typeface Johnston Sans, commissioned in 1913 for the London Underground. The family, which was originally titled Underground, was created to strengthen the corporate identity of the transportation group and create distance from the many advertisements found throughout the Underground system. To accomplish this, Johnston developed a new humanist sans serif typeface with the help of his Central School of Arts and Crafts student, Arthur Eric Rowton Gill.
Years later, while living in the Welsh mountains, Gill set out to create the perfect sans serif typeface — one that was more legible than the work created by Johnston. In his 1931 Essay on Typography Gill voiced his complaints with Johnston Sans: “The first notable attempt to work out the norm for plain letters was made by Mr. Edward Johnston when he designed the sans-serif letter for the London Underground Railways. Some of these letters are not entirely satisfactory, especially when it is remembered that, for such a purpose, an alphabet should be as near as possible ‘fool-proof.’” Gill began experimenting with his new, “fool-proof” sans serif forms in his personal notebooks and on wayfinding signs to guide tourists around the local monastery. The first major appearance of Gill Sans came, as Gill later explained in his autobiography, in 1926 when “a forward-minded bookseller (Douglas Cleverdon) asked me to paint his shop fascia.” Seeking a family to compete with the overwhelmingly successful Futura of Germany, Gill’s friend Stanley Morison commissioned him to design an original typeface for Monotype, based off of the “improved” sans serif forms from the Cleverdon sign, and Gill Sans was officially released in 1928.
The impact of Gill Sans was instant, and it would eventually become known as the “Helvetica of England” due to its widespread use for all things English. In 1929 it was adopted as the official typeface of the London and North Eastern Railway, appearing on everything from railroad schedules to restaurant menus and decorating the locomotives themselves. Other significant English patrons included the Royal Society of Arts and the Church of England. Several years later Gill Sans became a well-established corporate typeface. The BBC adopted it for their new logo in the mid-1900s — one that they still use today. Having proven itself with the transportation industry, British Railways and Network Rail also began using it as a standard. Gill Sans would ultimately be Monotype’s fifth best selling typeface of the 20th century, resulting in Monotype officially making it their corporate face as well. The most notable use of Gill Sans came in 1935 when designer Edward Young made it the official typeface of the original, iconic Penguin Books jacket design.
The commercial success of Gill Sans would continue to be reinforced over the next decade as a wide range of weights and widths were added to the family. However, a majority of these were created by Monotype staff with some input from Gill, resulting in numerous inconsistencies between weights. Monotype would eventually write off these inconsistencies as individual characteristics between fonts:
“Each weight retains a distinct character of its own. The light font, with its heavily kerned ‘F’ and tall ‘T’, has an open, elegant look. The regular font has a more compact and muscular appearance, with its flat-bottomed ‘D’, flat-topped ‘P’ and ‘Q’, and short, triangular-topped ‘T’. The bold font tends to echo the softer, more open style of the light, while the extra bold and ultra bold have their own vivid personalities.”
But Monotype can’t take all the blame for Gill Sans’ uniformity issues. Early in his career Eric Gill was accomplished at many things — as an artist, stone cutter, sculptor, and wood engraver — but not a type designer. Gill’s initial designs for his sans serif letters showed great skill in creating line forms, but none of the basic principles of letter spacing and optical detail that a trained type designer would possess. While working with Monotype to develop his initial mechanical face Gill freely admitted that he was not designing type, and did not possess the proper knowledge of — as he described it — “typographical exigencies.”
Gill Sans’ flaws are also some of its most recognizable characters, beginning with its lowercase “g”. Described by Sebastian Carter in Twentieth Century Type Designers as the “eyeglass g”, this two-story character possesses a curved link that is reminiscent of the bridge on a pair of glasses, with a round left (top) lens and oblong right that is just slightly off-center, creating a downward slope in its upright form. More importantly, the directional stress of this lower bowl is inconsistent between weights, and even changes to the form of a lowercase italic “g” for the Ultra Bold version. And like the “g”, the lowercase a takes a two-story form but transforms to single-story for the italic version. Letters with significant bowls, such as the lowercase “b”, “d”, “p”, and “q”, exhibit many differences in form across weights as well. If you compare Gill Sans Light with Gill Sans Regular, two weights that should possess minor differences, you’ll see that the bowls become flatter and terminal stroke details disappear as weight is added. Lowercase letters also exhibit conflicting strokes and terminations — just compare the lowercase “r” and “t” — and an overly long, straight descender on the lowercase “y” that looks entirely out of place.
The Gill Sans family is significantly heavy as well, with Gill Sans Light equating to the normal or regular weight of most typefaces, and Gill Sans Medium similar to most bold types. Designed originally as a display face, Gill saw a desirability in darker types as outlined in his Essay on Typography: “I myself am responsible for designing five different sorts of sans-serif letters — each one thicker and fatter than the last because every advertisement has to try and shout down its neighbors.”
Today, most designers approach Gill Sans with caution, but not entirely for the reasons one would assume. In 1989 Fiona MacCarthy published a biography on Gill that detailed evidence, from Gill’s own journals, of sexual relationships with his sister, daughters, and family dog. MacCarthy argued that Gill’s behavior was the product of an inquisitive mind and that “the urge to try things out, to push experience to limits was part of his nature.” Many designers have called for an open boycott of the typefaces Gill designed, which also include Perpetua and Joanna, while others take a more lighthearted approach to the legacy of Eric Gill. In 1990, designer Barry Deck, the author of Template Gothic, released a tribute font to Gill titled Canicopulus. Gill died in 1940 just as the Ministry of Information began urging the people of England to, much like the history of Gill Sans, “keep calm and carry on.”
Originally posted on 19 October 2012 by Jon Robinson
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