Reproduced by kind permission of The Orion Publishing Group Limited. Blandford Press, London, UK 1958. CategoryPrint DesignMy roleResearch + DesignYearMay, 2017. I will make a âgâ rather like a pair of spectacles.â- Eric Gill. This tradition, upheld by Monotype until the early 1990s, was not carried forward to Adobe GillSans. Gill Sans is the ‘New Black’: Revival or Reaction? Gill is considered a rather infamous figure for his controversial stance on art that most often involved erotic imagery, despite his strong religious views. This leads me to disagree with the many descriptions of the design of Gill Sans that still contend that the typeface is “based on Roman character shapes and proportions” or “does not reject traditional forms and proportions”. Working from Ditchling in Sussex, where he lived with his wife, in 1910 Gill began direct carving of stone figures. AKA Arthur Eric Rowton Gill. Underground Alphabe by Edward Johnston’s of 1916 was the base font of Gill Sans. This typeface was initially recommended for advertising and headline use, but as the public got used to reading sans-serif, Gill Sans turned out to work just as well for body text. One of the abiding eccentricities of Gill Sans is that its range of weights appears darker and less evenly distributed than any comparable face (even Futura is better moderated in this respect). Letters like âQâ and âRâ have a calligraphic tail. Arthur Eric Rowton Gill (February 22 1882 – November 17 1940) was an English sculptor, typeface designer, and printmaker, who played a key part in the Arts and Crafts movement. Diagrams of how not to make letters – 7, 8 and 11 are ‘overbold’, 12 is ‘hardly recognisable’; page 51 of Eric Gill’s Essay on Typography. That the face is now as convenient to use as a Palatino or Helvetica may have something to do with this continued popularity. J.M. The new compound name and the missing foundry attribution serves to distance today’s users of this type from any awareness that Monotype used to issue Gill Sans in a range of different series with alternate cuts. Specimens of Type from the Monotype Foundry St. Bride Printing Library, Corporation of London, UK retrieved October 19 2006. He was a major figure affiliated with the Arts and Crafts movement. The old metal version of Granby has a faithfulness to Johnston’s proportions and characteristics that Eric Gill missed in such a way as to suggest he did it deliberately. This aside, there cannot be any real improvement in the character shapes themselves, precisely for the reasons given in the original article. The original design was created in 1926 when Douglas Cleverdon opened a bookshop in his home town of Bristol, for which Gill painted a fascia over the window in sans … Once everything was done, a dozen zines were printed and distributed among my friends and faculties. Three variants of lowercase ‘a’; the more rational forms are the ones that didn’t make the final cut. This alters the letterforms’ balance in direct contradiction to the idea that he was somehow preserving classical proportions. This article is intended for an audience of contemporary designers and students who are at least one step removed from mid-century British typographic culture; it is a critique of the Gill Sans typeface and the idiosyncrasies of its creation from a contemporary perspective. How flawed? This ‘new’ Gill Sans also includes Greek, Cyrillic and many accented characters in the Opentype format, as well as extra sorts and roman numerals, (but no alternative ‘a’ or ‘crotched’ versions of b, d, p or q). Gill Sans now represents one of his most widely used font in the world. Tools usedTools used for this project were Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign. Although other writers have celebrated the individual qualities of Gill Sans Q, R, a, g and t, as designs in their own right, I contend that the majority of character shapes in Gill Sans are actually worse than in Johnston’s design of fifteen years previous. Aside from inconsistencies of the weights in Gill Sans, Gill changed proportions between capital height, stroke width and character width. Morison ordered a typeface based on those monumental sans-serif capitals. Gill Sans Light (series 362) may equate to the book, normal or even the regular weight in other typefaces, just as Gill Sans Medium (series 262) looks like boldface in comparison, and Gill Sans Bold (series 275) is already well on the way to what Gill himself called Gill Sans Double Elefans. A likely reason for this is that Gill, as a stonecarver and sculptor, had his ideas about the apparent desirability of darker types formed by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris nearly 50 years earlier. Meanwhile, students should be urged to approach Gill Sans with caution; it is a hard typeface to use well without making considerable effort. To complement the exterior signage, Gill produced a smaller alphabet in a blank book intended as a guide for Cleverdon to make future notices and announcements. Typographer, Gill Sans. In 1900, he relocated to London to pursue a career in architecture. The roots of Gill Sans can trace back to the typeface that Gillâs teacher, Edward Johnston, designed for the signage of the London Underground Railway in 1918. Yet this is exactly what happened to Gill Sans – rather than refuse commissions for Extra Bold and Ultra Bold (well beyond the weight of what was considered normal), he continued to draw up and deliver designs that he knew to be aesthetically unjustifiable. These included Madonna and Child (1910), which English painter and art critic Roger Fry described in 1911 as a depiction of "pathetic animalism", and Ecstasy (1911). Like Johnston’s Underground lettering, Gill Sans began life as a piece of signage, a fascia board for the shop of Douglas Cleverdon. Ever since Gill Sans was incorporated into the Adobe/Linotype library in the early 1990s what used to be Monotype Gill Sans became GillSans. A diverse familyGillâs lettering is based on classic roman proportions, which gives this sans-serif a less mechanical feel than its geometric contemporaries. Jan Middendorp. Gill Sans Nova retains much of the original design by Eric Gill. Looking at the original trial drawings for this ‘g’ in which the link is weaker, longer and the bowl correspondingly lower, it is easy to rebut this argument. Since the inspirations of Optima (1958, by Hermann Zapf) and Syntax (1969, by Hans Eduard Meier), there has been a steady rise in the number of sans serif faces that have a humanistic structure and are good for a variety of tasks. Elsewhere Gill labels his diagrams with terms ‘sans overbold’, ‘hardly recognisable’ and ‘fatuous’, to drive home his point about the distortion of letterforms in the heaviest weights. It’s easy to see from today’s perspective, that to beat the competition, Gill employed a certain amount of bombast and hyperbole to secure critical success, while the Monotype sales force were able to supply volume discounts to institutional customers. The directional stress of the lower bowl is not consistent from weight to weight in Gill Sans, and it changes form entirely (to a continental or italic g) in the Ultra Bold weight; the fatness of the letter does not allow four strokes and two counters to fit within the allotted vertical space. Dent & Sons, London 1931 • Eric Gill, Autobiography. Twentieth Century Type Designers (Second Edition) by Sebastian Carter, Lund Humphries Publishing, London, UK 1995. So to pick an argument with something that is akin to a typographic national monument might appear unwise; it is so very much ‘ours’. The editor was proud to announce that Gill "designed the Gill Sans typeface often seen in Angelus Press Publications." Origins of Gill Sans in Johnston. In 2006, now that Gill Sans is distributed freely with Apple’s OS X and Adobe’s Creative Suite products, it is time to re-examine those flaws. Eric Gill perfected the design using his specialty of designing and sculpture. The Gill Sans ‘g’ is another instance of ‘do as I say not as I do’; elsewhere in Gill’s Essay on Typography is a diagram of the forms of lowercase ‘g’ accompanied by the sneer “…comic modern varieties – as though the designer had said: A pair of spectacles is rather like a g; I will make a g rather like a pair of spectacles.” Sebastian Carter, writing in ‘Twentieth Century Type Designers’, called this the ‘eyeglass g’, claiming that it had been kept and improved from the Johnston alphabet. Gill Sans: Pride of England? Further, the magazine advertised an essay by Eric Gill - Painting and the Public. Well, monumentally flawed, in fact. Gill Sans is the Helvetica of England; ubiquitous, utilitarian and yet also quite specific in its ability to point to our notions of time and place. While Monotype’s older publicity material never claimed Gill as being suitable for extended text setting, tastes and applications have changed; a recent assignment at my University showed nearly a third of second year degree students choosing Gill Sans as a headline and text face for a publication assignment. Capital Transport Publishing, London, UK 2000. Letters are things made for reading, and that is what Gill designed them for. Bastien Brothers, West Drayton, Middlesex, UK 1948. Three new typefaces for local institutions draw on Sheffield’s cultural and typographic history by Catherine Dixon and Phil Baines, Eye Magazine issue 58, Haymarket Publishing, London, UK. âA pair of spectacles is rather like a âgâ. Gill started working on Gill Sans in 1927 and produced Joanna a few years later, in 1930; both fonts have been since adopted by Monotype, which has continuously been adapting them to contemporary typographic needs, from different alphabets to new currency symbols, as well as use on digital platforms. Notable non-British modern businesses using Gill Sans include United Colours of Benetton, Tommy Hilfiger, and Saab Automobile.âToday over two dozen Gill Sans designs are available digitally, with mainstream reach. The question to ask is this; if Gill found it necessary to introduce his (strictly unnecessary but aesthetically defensible) curves into the tail of ‘Q’ and the leg of ‘R’ in the uppercase, where none had been drawn in the existing model, why did he find it expedient to remove the existing curve (which was both necessary and defensible) in the tail of the lowercase ‘y’? The older Gill Sans MT appellation and Monotype icon set. He is probably best known for his typeface Gill Sans which became ubiquitous from the 1920s onwards, but he was also famous in his own day for his radical views and eccentric appearance.. As the preferred typeface of British establishments (the Railways, the Church, the BBC and Penguin Books), Gill Sans is part of the British visual heritage just like the Union Jack and the safety pin. In the 1990s, the BBC adopted Gill Sans for its word-mark and many of its on-screen television graphics. Gill Sans (197) Gill Kayo (74) Perpetua (24) Perpetua Titling (10) Gill Sans Bold Extra Condensed (8) Gill Facia (7) Joanna (4) Aries (1) Gill Floriated Capitals (1) Gill Sans Nova (1) Pilgrim (1) Bunyan; FTN Eric Sans; Gill Display Compressed; Gill Hebrew; Humanist 521; ITC Golden Cockerel; Joanna Nova; Joanna Sans Nova; Lapidary 333; Solus Gill Sans History. Originally Gill designed this typeface as an uppercase, and the lowercase characters were added in 1929. Eric Gill, the man responsible for designing Gill Sans, was a versatile and brilliant talent in the early part of the last century. In terms of design, however, Stephenson, Blake’s secret advantage may have lain in the fact that they had cut the wooden masters for Johnston’s original London Underground lettering. Readers with experience of metal and phototypesetting may recall this system, but for now, the majority of us only have this ‘bundled’ version of GillSans to go by. The Letterforms and Type Designs of Eric Gill by Robert Harling, David R. Godine, Boston, USA 1977. Specimens of Type from the Stephenson Blake Foundry St. Bride Printing Library, Corporation of London, UK retrieved October 9 2000. He founded artistic groups, almost colonies, at Ditchling in Sussex, Capel-y-ffin in Wales, and at Piggotts in Buckinghamshire which provided a mixture of solitude and sanctity, away from modern life. The successful Gill Sans typeface was designed by the English artist and type designer Eric Gill and originally issued by Monotype in 1928 to 1930. His best known type designs were produced by the Monotype corporation, although he also designed type for private presses. He was known for his association with the Arts and Crafts movement. To be fair to Gill, the initial intention was perhaps quite casual – but the result was seized upon in such a way that it forced Gill to step into Johnston’s shadow, on a commission that was to have far wider implications. One discovery was a dog-eared folder dated 1940 containing sketches for a Plough logo and letterhead design by a British typeface designer. Following the traditional serif model, the italic has different letter forms from the roman, where many sans-serifs simply slant the letters in what is called an oblique style. One of the most famous British typefaces, Gill Sans, was used in the classic design system of Penguin Books and by the London and North Eastern Railway and later British Railways. Gill Sans was created in 1926, but the roots can be traced back to the typeface that Gill’s teacher Edward Johnston designed for London Underground Railway in … The basic letter shapes do not look consistent across styles, especially in Extra Bold and Extra Condensed widths, while the Ultra Bold style is effectively a different design altogether and was originally marketed as such. Gill Sans todayThe BBC adopted the typeface as its corporate typeface in 1997 for many but not all purposes, including on its logo. In addition to sanctioned and licensed revivals such as P22’s London Underground (1997 by Richard Kegler) and ITC Johnston (1999 by Dave Farey and Richard Dawson), a number of recent type designs now remind us of the original beauty of Edward Johnston’s vision rather than Eric Gill’s. What is a Zine?A zine is a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, usually reproduced via photocopier. 42pt Granby in metal from the Stephenson Blake Foundry. However, writing his Essay on Typography in 1931, Gill claimed that Johnston’s letters were not entirely satisfactory or ‘fool-proof’, and that his new Monotype Sans Serif, the prototype of Gill Sans, was superior. Comparison of uppercase E and F in Gill Sans and Johnston. During its first decades, Gill Sans was recommended for advertising and display use only. Light at the end of the tunnel for Johnston? Gill Sans adalah sebuah rupa huruf tanpa kait (sans serif) yang didesain oleh perancang rupa huruf Britania Raya, Eric Gill.Rupa huruf ini pertama kali dirilis pada tahun 1928. From the Monotype .pdf catalog at myfonts.com; apparently the only alternative glyph in the entire Gill Sans Opentype Pro font is the proportional numeral one. Gill Sans (208) Gill Kayo (79) Perpetua (25) Perpetua Titling (10) Gill Sans Bold Extra Condensed (9) Gill Facia (7) Joanna (4) Aries (1) Gill Floriated Capitals (1) Gill Sans Nova (1) Pilgrim (1) Bunyan; FTN Eric Sans; Gill Display Compressed; Gill Hebrew; Humanist 521; ITC Golden Cockerel; Joanna Nova; Joanna Sans Nova; Lapidary 333; Solus Set it in Gill Sans and print it in British Racing Green’. This new release now addresses several of the criticisms made in the original article (2007), including a recognisable numeral 1 and a semi-bold weight – which is very useful when using Gill Sans Light for text setting. The book has been compiled by Gill's nephew, himself a scholar and printer. Device Fonts: 10 Year Itch 1995-2005 by Rian Hughes, Device Ltd, London, UK 2006. His achievements, the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, the statue of Prospero and Ariel over the front door to Broadcasting House and his typeface, Gill Sans… The central argument is that an earlier typeface by Eric Gill’s mentor, Edward Johnston, is a superior piece of type design. FB Agenda (1993 by Greg Thompson), Bliss (1996 by Jeremy Tankard) and Fedra Sans (2001 by Peter Bilak), are some of the recently-produced typographical riches that all owe some part of their provenance to Edward Johnston’s sans serif lettering for the London Underground in 1916 – a project that the younger Eric Gill briefly assisted on and freely acknowledged as being the original model for Gill Sans. The claim made against Johnston’s earlier design; pages 48-49 of Eric Gill’s Essay on Typography. Comparison of lowercase l, i and numeral 1 in Gill Sans and Johnston. His name was Eric Gill. The purpose was to know the history of the font, the designer, similar fonts, and its current use. Even typography agnostics will recognize Gill’s best-known typeface, Gill Sans – you have seen it … This is debatable – only with ‘J’ and ‘Q’ is there a potential argument about their improvement. Examples of conflicts in stroke terminations; lowercase r, t and y compared. Gill obliterated the terminus endings of the vertical stroke in ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q’; the Monotype drawing office again came to his assistance and revised the forms so that they were preserved in the medium weight (this can be seen on early samples of the series 262). Design and publicationAfter the research and gathering of the information was done, it was now time to layout the information. Besides similar fonts, many signs and objects made in Britain during the period of Gill Sansâ dominance, such as the famous Keep Calm and Carry On poster, received a hand-painted or custom lettering similar to Gill Sans. Eric Gill's typography (Gill Sans etc) draftsmanship and carving almost defined the style of England in the 1930s. Lower case âLâ and uppercase âiâ are exactly the same. As reported in issue 58 (winter 2005) of Eye magazine, Jeremy Tankard was commissioned by Sheffield City Council to create Sheffield Sans. The successful Gill Sans typeface was designed by the English artist and type designer Eric Gill and originally issued by Monotype in 1928 to 1930. Thus, rather than Johnston’s lettering, it was Gill Sans that became the English national style of the mid-century. Contemporary sans serifs Bliss and FB Agenda join forces with revivals from ITC and P22. The lowercase ‘y’ was designed with a straight descending tail which makes the character appear rigid and unbalanced. Eric Gill (1882-1930) was a sculptor, a typographist, a wood engraver, and an influential artist-craftsman in the early years of the twentieth century. In Gill Sans (appointed typeface to a nation of shopkeepers), this feature is absent and Monotype were obliged to produce a complete alternate cut for Gill Sans, designated ‘F’ that included a ‘proper’ numeral 1 that could be used for numerical setting, such as shop window prices and timetables. While most of the uppercase appear compromised against their Johnston counterparts, the significant demonstrations concern the simplest shapes. While Gill narrowed the proportions of the M, his version of L, N and T are all much wider than in Johnston’s alphabet. The Eric Gill Series is a collection of 77 fonts in three families: Gill Sans Nova, Joanna Nova and Joanna Sans Nova.All the typefaces are derived from the original work of the influential British artist Eric Gill (1882-1940), acclaimed in his lifetime as a sculptor, letter-cutter and type designer. Eric Gill was a twentieth century British sculptor, printmaker and typeface designer. In the world of typography, he is known famously for his sans-serif typeface, Gill Sans released by the British branch of Monotype in 1928. There are three developmental forms of the Gill Sans lowercase ‘a’ on record; revisions were made at the Monotype drawing office and passed back to Gill for approval. This is why series 442, the Ultra Bold weight, is otherwise called Kayo for ‘knockout’ – it was envisaged as an (English) heavyweight champion capable of slugging it out with (German) Futura Extra Bold. Other more recent British organizations using Gill Sans have included Railtrack, John Lewis, and the Church of England. Monotype is staging a week-long celebration of Eric Gill and his most legendary works. New Faces (Chapter One: Technological and Industrial Change: Setting the Scene). Johnston’s Underground Type by Justin Howes. The roots of Gill Sans can be traced to the typeface that Gill's teacher, Edward Johnston, designed for the signage of the London Underground Railway in 1918. But it is a flawed masterpiece. The processSince this was a research based project, the whole process was brief which included - Research, Design, and Publication. About the projectWith this individual classroom project, the aim was to research about a particular font. With uppercase E and F, Gill standardised the length of the lower and middle arms to match the width of the topmost arm, narrowing the overall widths of both letters to compensate. Crucially this also makes extra white space around the letterforms – therefore N and T dominate the appearance of Gill Sans with their broad diagonal and open white space, requiring extra care with kerning and letterspacing. The original design for ‘a’ is strikingly similar to Johnston’s (as might be expected), followed by a second attempt which was put into production and can be seen on early specimen sheets. Identifont.com currently lists Gill Sans at six out of ten most requested fonts. Overview The successful Gill Sans® was designed by the English artist and type designer Eric Gill and issued by Monotype in 1928 to 1930. Gill’s patron, Stanley Morison, as advisor to the Monotype Corporation, was probably the single most powerful individual in British typefounding in the 1920s. The last has been called the… Gill Sans is a humanist sans serif with some geometric touches in its structures. After thorough research, the findings were narrowed down and later were published as a zine. Was Gill Sans ever designed as a jobbing typeface – suitable for a variety of purposes? Eric Gill. Gill Sans is a sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill.It was offered by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards.. Gill Sans is based on Edward Johnston's 1916 "Underground Alphabet", the corporate font of London Underground.As a young artist Gill had assisted Johnston in its early development stages. References: An Essay on Typography by Eric Gill, J. M. Dent & Sons, London, UK 1931. The Gill Sans Nova typeface family is part of the new Eric Gill Series, drawing on Monotype's heritage to remaster and expand and revitalize Eric Gill's body of work, with more weights, more characters and more languages to meet a wide range of design requirements. He became a founder member of the newly established Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry. He was an English sculptor, typeface designer, and printmaker at the same time. The roots of Gill Sans can be traced to the typeface that Gill's teacher, Edward Johnston, designed for the signage of … History In 1920 Eric Gill started working on type design, and in 1928 Gill Sans was born. Gill Sans is a humanist sans serif with some geometric touches in its structures. How do you do British post-war design? Update, 16 March, 2016: Creative Type by Cees W. de Jong, Alston W. Purvis and Friedrich Friedl. Sources: • Eric Gill, An essay on typography. In typography: Mechanical composition …design Morison supervised were Eric Gill’s Sans Serif, which enjoyed a wide vogue in advertising and avant-garde book typography; Gill’s Perpetua, based upon his stonecut letters; and Times New Roman, designed by Morison himself for The Times (London), whose staff he joined in 1930. When one’s view of a historic facade includes a very large and well-known monument, it can be hard to see which background details are obscured by the foreground presence, and this is where English sans serif type design has been for the last sixty years. There were other, arguably better, typefaces derived from the ideal of making a monoline sans serif based on humanist structures. Created at a time when Gill Sans was the new sensation, Granby was formulated to be the local competition. Another similar but more eccentric design was created by Harold Curwen for the use of his family company, the Curwen Press of Plaistow. Similar fontsAn immediate metal type competitor to Gill Sans was Granby from Stephenson Blake. The development of Gill Sans. Eric Gill, who died in 1940, is perhaps best known for his Gill Sans design, prominently used by British Railways and Penguin Books. Arthur Eric Rowton Gill ARA (/ˈɡɪl/; 22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, typeface designer, and printmaker, who was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.He is a controversial figure, with his well-known religious views and subject matter generally viewed as being at odds with his sexual behaviour, including his erotic art and sexual abuse of his daughters. Gill Sans is not based on purely geometric principles, some aspects of Gill Sans do nonetheless have a geometric feel. A. Gill Sans Stephen Skelton Arthur Eric Rowton Gill (1882 – 1940) was a supremely talented – yet controversial – artist. The Encyclopedia of Typefaces (Second Edition) by W. Turner Berry, A. F. Johnson, W. P. Jaspert. This release adds new weights and more pronounced contrast and personality. 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 neighbours.”. Now publicly released as Wayfarer, this type was partially inspired by the spirit of Granby, which had originally been released by the Sheffield foundry Stephenson, Blake in 1930. Now that the new OpenType format allows for extensive support including alternate sorts and contextual spacing, the typographic community should look forward to a better version of Gill Sans OpenType Pro; perhaps a complete overhaul in the style of Frutiger, Sabon, Optima and Syntax? Monotype released the Eric Gill Series including Gill Sans Nova (a long-awaited update by George Ryan) in November 2015 with an exhibition in London’s Brick Lane at the Truman Brewery. Gills Sans Nova … Gill Sans Light (above) and Gill Sans Regular (below); flattening of the bowls and subsequent loss of terminal stroke details in lowercase ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q’. Fedra Sans by Peter Biľak, 2001; diamond-shaped dots show historic character at larger sizes. The font I selected to research was Gill Sans by Eric Gill. The âCâ and âaâ have a much less âfolded upâ structure, with wider apertures. Comparison of uppercase ‘K’ and ‘T’ in Gill Sans and Johnston. So much for ‘fool-proof’! Gill Sans is a sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards. Shorter middle arms help balance and legibility in Johnston’s case. As a graphic designer’s in-joke once put it ‘Q. Lettering Alphabets (Third Edition) by Alfred Bastien. Gill Sans dipandang sebagai salah satu karya Eric Gill yang paling berpengaruh serta salah satu … Nearly a century later, Edward Johnston’s pioneering work is still the big noise in contemporary sans serif typeface design. The reason for Gill Sans’ near ubiquity is because it is an exceptionally distinctive design with a potential range of use that is almost limitless. That this project has returned to inform some of the really great type design of the last fifteen years is a testament to how the problem was not solved in 1928. These fonts are designed for European languages written with Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. A collection of Eric Gill's engravings, this book is a tribute to this sculptor, wood-engraver and the designer of the Gill Sans and Joanna typefaces. It can be seen everywhere, used (or overused) on everything from corporate logos to movie posters. However it is perfectly clear from reading Gill’s own Essay on Typography what he thought about the advisability of making extra bold weights of display typefaces: “…as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools. Arthur Eric Rowton Gill was a sculptor, engraving artist, typographic designer, and author from the United Kingdom. Eric Gill is probably best known to readers as the creator of several typefaces (Gill Sans, Perpetua etc), but in his time he was also considered a world-class sculptor, and many of his works remain on prominent display in the UK. Winter 2005. Stylistically it calls into question Gill’s deletion of the foot serif for the lowercase ‘l’ in Johnston’s model – a feature which had an essential function within that alphabet, as it allowed distinction between the numeral 1, uppercase ‘I’ and lowercase ‘l’. Originally from Sussex, Gill was a student of Chichester Technical and Art School. The third and least satisfactory character is seen in all versions of Gill Sans since the early 1930s. Copyright ©2005 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London, UK 2005. Variation of the directional stress from weight to weight of Gill Sans in the lower bowl of the ‘eyeglass g’ – no longer ‘eyeglass’ or double storey by the time it becomes Ultra Bold. Uk 1948 ’ is there a potential argument about their improvement i selected research. Kind permission of the font i selected to eric gill gill sans was Gill Sans Johnston... Bliss and FB Agenda join forces with revivals from ITC and P22 shorter middle eric gill gill sans help balance legibility! 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