archive Johnston had become interested in sans-serif letters some years before the commission: although best known as a calligrapher, he had written and worked also on custom lettering, and in his 1906 textbook
Writing and Illuminating and Lettering had noted "It is quite possible to make a beautiful and characteristic alphabet of equal-stroke letters, on the lines of the so-called 'block letter'
[the sans-serif letters of contemporary trade] but properly proportioned and finished." He had also written in spring 1913 that new books should "bear some living mark of the time in which we live." Johnston had previously unsuccessfully attempted to enter type design, a trade which at the time normally made designs in-house. Howes wrote that Johnston's font was "the first typeface to have been designed for day-to-day use by a leading artist-craftsman." Pick specified to Johnston that he wanted a typeface that would ensure that the Underground Group's posters would not be mistaken for advertisements; it should have "the bold simplicity of the authentic lettering of the finest periods" and belong "unmistakably to the twentieth century". Pick considered a sans-serif best suited to transport use, concluding that the
Column of Trajan capitals were not suited to reproduction on flat surfaces. In 1933, The Underground Group was absorbed by the
London Passenger Transport Board and the typeface was adopted as part of the
London Transport brand. As early as 1937, the LPTB mentioned it as a package promoting the system's billboards to advertisers as an example of its commitment to stylish design, along with its commission of art from
Feliks Topolski. Johnston's drawings survive in the
Victoria and Albert Museum. Johnston's original design came with two weights, ordinary and
bold, while condensed letters soon followed for use on buses to show routes and destinations. Heavy does not contain lower-case letters. Johnston also worked on other lettering and branding for the Underground system, most famously the 'bar and circle' roundel that the Underground continues to use (refined from earlier designs where the roundel was solid red) . The font family was called a variety of names in its early years, such as Underground or Johnston's Railway Type, before later being generally called simply Johnston. (A similar problem exists with Gill Sans, which was at first often referred to by other names such as its order number, Series 238, Gill Sans-serif, or Monotype Sans-serif.)
New Johnston 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. By the 1970s, as
cold type was becoming the norm for printing, Johnston had become difficult for printers to use. Signs and posters of the period started to use other, more easily sourced typefaces such as
Helvetica,
Univers and
News Gothic. To maintain London Transport's old corporate identity, Johnston was rendered into cold type. Rather than simply producing a phototype of the original design, Johnston was redesigned in 1979 by Eiichi Kono at
Banks & Miles to produce
New Johnston. The new family comes in eight members: Light, Medium, Bold weights with corresponding Italics, Medium Condensed and Bold Condensed (the old family had only two weights: Regular and Bold, and the latter had no lowercase letters). After all precisely hand-drawn letters (nearly 1,000) were completed and sent to AlphaType for digitisation in the US in 1981–82, New Johnston finally became ready for Linotron photo-typesetting machine, and first appeared in London's Underground stations in 1983. It is the official typeface exclusively used by Transport for London and The Mayor of London ever since. The New Johnston Medium as the new standard is slightly heavier or bolder than the original Johnston Regular (or sometimes confusingly called Medium) and lighter than the original Bold, and has a larger
x-height, made suitable for main text setting as well as large display sizes. The average x-height of the New Johnston is roughly 7% larger than the original as the limit for keeping the original Johnston flavour, which was fundamental. The larger x-height allowed larger counters, and type size (size of x-height in particular) and weight are reciprocal factors for legibility, but enlarging x-height can affect style and appearance. Since the original Johnston weights, Regular and Bold, were maintained as closely as possible, inevitably New Johnston Medium appears very close to Light and Bold. This is the whole point of this particular solution because New Johnston Medium works as the one-fits-all standard font for virtually every application from large type sizes for posters and signs to minute type sizes for pocket map maintaining much improved legibility. Punctuation marks are matched the diamond
tittle, differing from Johnston's original design, enhancing the identity of London Transport. In 1990–1992 Banks and Miles, in partnership with Signus Limited digitised the first
PostScript Type 1 fonts for the then London Transport under the auspices of the corporate design manager, Roger Hughes. Hughes and Jeremy Rewse-Davies, LT's design director, also commissioned New Johnston Book, a special weight with distinctive modifications to allow better representation on low-resolution laser printers. The New Johnston Book weight was designed specifically for high volume publications and its usage was intended to be restricted to sizes below 12pt. In 2002 the typeface was digitised on behalf of Transport for London by Agfa Monotype Corporation, with the addition of two further weights, Book and Book Bold, as well as corresponding italic variants. The revised font family – not commercially available – is known as 'New Johnston TfL'. In the early stages of digitisation, there was the chronic problem in letter-spacing, which seems to be solved more or less by now. 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. 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.
Johnston Delf Smith variation of the font, as seen at
Sudbury Town Underground station This variant was commissioned by
Frank Pick as a
wedge-serif variation of the organisation's standard
sans-serif Johnston face and was designed by
Percy Delf Smith, a former pupil of Edward Johnston; Johnston had considered a wedge-serif design during the early stages of the commission. The typeface was originally used for the headquarters building at
55 Broadway, SW1, It can only be seen on some signs at
Sudbury Town on the Piccadilly line. In early 2007, a digitisation of the typeface was developed by
Transport for London under the name
Johnston Delf Smith for its own use on historic signs. It is the property of TfL. Designer Matthieu Cortat has released an unrelated implementation of the design commercially, under the name Petit Serif.
Johnston 100 , characterised by the diagonal bowl on the lowercase 'g' and the new 'Light' weight A new version, known as
Johnston 100, was commissioned by Transport for London from Monotype in 2016 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the typeface. It includes two new weights, 'Hairline' and 'Thin', for digital use, as well as symbols such as the
hash character #. Several characters have been changed, such as the restoration of the diagonal bowl on the lowercase 'g' which was lost in New Johnston. The font is designed to reflect Johnston's original intentions, and to be closer to the original version of the Johnston typeface. ==Non-TfL digitisations==