wdr@wang.com (William Ricker) (03/28/91)
>tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) wrote: >> Doesn't it look like the face the Brits use on their street and >>tube signs and a lot of their adverts? I replied: >Yes. >Eric Gill was the apprentice to the type designer (whose name I forget) >who designed the face for the London Metro (tube stations). Gill Sans >does bear a *very* strong resemblence to the Metro face, but Gill denied ** [loose phrasing] ** ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >any connection between his Sans face and his master's Metro. ... ** [even worse, outright erroneous ] ** ^^^^^ Dick Dunn responded by mail: > Dwiggins designed "the popular type family Metro, cut in 1929, which is > still used in newspaper typography." This was done while he was at > Mergenthaler. > By any chance were you thinking of "Underground"? That was by Edward > Johnston, who *was* British. I don't know if Gill was apprenticed to > Johnston, but Underground looks to be a close ancestor of Gill Sans. I shouldn't have assumed that the name of the face on the Metro signs was Metro. I'd forgotten that Dwiggins, a patron saint here in Boston, had designed a face by that name. (Must get a copy of Lawson's atlas of type, that Dunn quotes from.) It must be the Johnston face "Underground" that I was referring to as the antecedent of Gill Sans that still adorns much of Greater London, at the entrances to the intraurban underground railway. Whether it is Gill Sans, Underground, or another similar face that the original poster sees in a deluge of British advertising I know not. [Note to americans: I didn't call the London undergound a "subway", since that is what they call pedestrian underpasses, not subterranean railroads as in America.] -- /s/ Bill Ricker wdr@wang.com The Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own one. *** Warning: This account is not authorized to express opinions. ***