Johnston (typeface)
Johnston (or Johnston Sans) is a sans-serif typeface designed by and named after Edward Johnston and commissioned by Frank Pick. It has been the corporate font of public transport in London since the foundation of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, and of predecessor companies since 1916, making its use one of the world's longest-lasting examples of corporate branding. It remains a copyrighted property of the LPTB's successor, Transport for London. It originated the genre of the humanist sans-serif typeface, typefaces that are sans-serif but take inspiration from traditional serif fonts and Roman inscriptions.
Johnston's student Eric Gill worked on the development of the typeface, which was later to influence his own Gill Sans typeface, released in 1928–32. As Johnston, a corporate font, was until recently not available for public licensing, Gill Sans would become used much more widely.
Features
The capitals of the typeface are based on Roman square capitals, and the lower-case on the humanistic minuscule, the handwriting in use in Italy in the fifteenth century. In this, it marked a break with the kinds of sans serif then popular, which are now normally known as grotesques, which tended to have squarer shapes. Other aspects are more geometric: the letter O is a perfect circle. The minuscule letters i and j have diagonally-placed square tittles, a motif that is repeated in the full stop, commas, apostrophes and other punctuation marks, which are also based on the diagonal square dot. As with most serif fonts, the 'g' is a 'two-story' design.
