Gill Sans - Wikipedia. Gill Sans is a sans- seriftypeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1. Gill Sans takes inspiration from the calligrapher and lettering artist Edward Johnston's 1. Gill as a young artist had assisted Johnston in its early development stages.
In 1. 92. 6, Douglas Cleverdon, a young printer and later a BBC executive, opened a bookshop in Bristol, and Gill painted a fascia for the shop for him in sans- serif capitals. In addition, Gill sketched an alphabet for Cleverdon as a guide for him to use for future notices and announcements. By this time Gill had become a prominent stonemason, artist and creator of lettering in his own right and had begun to work on creating typeface designs.
Gill was commissioned to develop his alphabet into a full metal type family by Stanley Morison, an influential Monotype executive and historian of printing. Morison hoped that it could be a competitor to a wave of German sans- serif fonts in a new . Gill Sans was released in 1. 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 .
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British Railways chose Gill Sans as its standard lettering when the railway companies were nationalised in 1. 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 . A basic set is included with some Microsoft software and Mac OS X.
Characteristics. Gill Sans does not use the single- storey . 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 . This gives Gill Sans a very different style of design to geometric sans- serifs like Futura, based on simple squares and circles, or realist or grotesque designs like Akzidenz- Grotesk, Helvetica and Univers influenced by nineteenth- century lettering styles. Respected by Arts and Crafts artisans as among the best ever drawn, many signs and engravings created with an intentionally artistic design in the early twentieth century in Britain are based on them. Edward Johnston in one of his books on lettering had written, .
They are the best forms for the grandest and most important inscriptions. This is clearest in the . Very characteristic of when it was designed and of when it was used. Johnston's design was rendered variably on some older signs, and this uses a condensed . Morison visited Cleverdon's bookshop while in Bristol in 1.
The upper-case of Gill Sans is partly modelled on Roman capitals like those found on the Column of Trajan. Edward Johnston in one of his books on lettering had. Information on where to get Adobe Type fonts and other frequently asked questions.
Gill's fascia and alphabet. Note the original . Pierpont was deeply unconvinced, commenting that he could . It is a much less sculptured design inspired by German sans- serifs.
While the capitals (which were prepared first) resemble Johnston quite closely, the archives document Gill (and the drawing office team at Monotype's works in Salfords, who developed a final precise design and spacing) grappling with the challenge of creating a viable humanist sans- serif lower- case and an italic, which Johnston did not have. Despite all he did for us .. His prestige has obscured their vulgarity and commercialism. The characters were drawn on paper in large plan diagrams by the experienced drawing office team, led and trained by American engineer Frank Hinman Pierpont and Fritz Steltzer, both of whom Monotype had recruited from the German printing industry.
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The diagrams were then used as a plan for machining metal punches by pantograph to stamp matrices. Its success was greatly aided by Monotype's sophisticated marketing, and due to its practicality and availability for machine composition in a very wide range of sizes and weights. Gill's colleague Robert Harling wrote in his 1. LNER system. Detail differences are obvious, especially the . Popular with advertisers, this allowed end- users to cast their own type at a very competitive price. Gill's biographer Malcolm Yorke has described it as . In the metal type era, a 'cameo ruled' design that placed white letters in boxes or against a stippled black background was available.
Note the differences in style, clearest in the . The dots (tittles) on the . This has often been branded as Gill Sans Ultra Bold, though in practice many letters vary considerably from Gill Sans. I myself am responsible for designing five different sorts of sans- serif letters – each one thicker and fatter than the last because each advertisement has to try and shout down its neighbours. These include Futura- inspired designs of .
Popular in design for body text, these are a traditional feature on serif fonts which Gill Sans did not originally have. The fonts released in 1. Light 3. 62, Series 2. Bold 2. 75, Extra Bold 3.
Condensed 3. 43, all of which were released in film matrix sets . In general characteristics for common weights the designs are similar, but there are some changes: for example, in the book weight the 2. 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 the structure of the font varied by size as is normal for metal type, with wider spacing and other detail changes at smaller text sizes.
It includes support of Greek characters. The family includes 2. Gill Sans Nova (2.
Gill Sans Nova adds many additional variants, including some of the previously undigitised inline versions and stylistic alternates and an ultra- light weight (once an option in metal type) which had been digitised for Grazia. Monotype celebrated the release with a London exhibition on Gill's work, as they had in 1. Gill's serif design Joanna.
Characters set support includes W1. G. The basic set of Regular, Light and Bold weights is bundled with Windows 1. Fascinated by railway engines since childhood, Gill was immensely proud of the LNER's decision to standardise on his font. Lettering was to use the Gill Sans typeface on a background of the regional colour. 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.
Other users included Penguin Books' iconic paperback jacket designs from 1. British official mapping agency Ordnance Survey. Mosley has commented that in 1. Kinneir and Calvert's road signage redesign used a similar approach. 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.
In fact we were already aware by 1. The death of metal type ..
Its editor Harriet Monroe had seen Gill's work in London. 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 2. While the lettering is clearly based on Gill Sans, some letters such as the R are very different. An immediate metal type competitor to Gill Sans was Granby from Stephenson Blake; it was based on Gill Sans and also Johnston.
It also included a . The sign is much closer to Gill Sans, but again the right- hand side of the legs of the . Released in 1. 96. Martin Majoor's FF Scala Sans is a popular example of this influenced by Gill's work, as are Charlotte Sans and Serif by Letraset and Mr and Mrs Eaves by Zuzana Licko, which are based on Baskerville. It is intended for use at smaller sizes than Gill Sans. However, the name . US) and therefore is not eligible to be used to name any derivative font.
Nonetheless, these designs were often products more of the machine than the hand, chilly and austere designs shaped by unbending rules, whose occasional moments of whimsy were so out of place as to feel volatile and disquieting. This contention had been a major part of the protracted and tense development of the Perpetua project, begun before Gill Sans but released second, since Monotype management scrapped the oblique for a more normal italic. Gill's friend John Dreyfus also remembered Gill doing some work on sans- serif letters that he thought were a project for Cunard. This style was occasionally used at the time. Johnston had considered it as a possible structure for the Underground alphabet and it was used on some variants of Johnston by the Underground with the involvement of Johnston's pupil Percy Delf Smith. The development of Johnston had gone through a similar paring- down process a decade earlier, in which the idea of incorporating many calligraphy- influenced glyphs, like a capital- form .
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 . Retrieved 7 January 2. Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design. ISBN 9. 78- 1- 5. Retrieved 8 December 2.
Retrieved 1. 2 November 2. Journal of the Edward Johnston Foundation. Retrieved 1. 3 October 2.