Gill Sans - Bold
TypefaceGill SansDate created1926Date released1928 (Monotype)Design based onVariationsGill KayoGill Sans is a humanist designed by and released by the British branch of from 1928 onwards.Gill Sans is based on 's 1916, the corporate font of. As a young artist, Gill had assisted Johnston in its early development stages. In 1926, a young printer-publisher, opened a bookshop in, 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 his friend, an influential Monotype executive and historian of printing. Morison hoped that it could be Monotype's competitor to a wave of German sans-serif families in a new ' style, which included, and, all being launched to considerable attention in Germany during the late 1920s. Gill Sans was released in 1928 by 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 to create a design that looked both cleanly modern and classical at the same time.Marketed by Monotype as a design of 'classic simplicity and real beauty', it was intended as a that could be used for posters and advertisements, as well as for the text of documents that need to be clearly legible at small sizes or from a distance, such as book blurbs, timetables and price lists. Designed before setting documents entirely in sans-serif text was common, its standard weight is noticeably bolder than most modern body text fonts.An immediate success, the year after its release the (LNER) chose it for all its posters, timetables and publicity material. Chose Gill Sans as the basis for its standard lettering when the were nationalised in 1948.
Fonts Similar To Gill Sans Bold
Gill Sans also soon became used on the modernist, deliberately simple covers of, 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 'the British ' because of its lasting popularity in British design. Gill Sans has influenced many other typefaces, and helped to define a genre of sans-serif, known as the style.Monotype rapidly expanded the original regular or medium weight into a large family of styles, which it continues to sell. A basic set is included with some software. Gill Sans compared to other sans-serifs of the period.
Gill Sans does not use the single-storey 'g' or 'a' used by many sans-serifs and is less monoline than Johnston. 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 in the upper case, and traditional serif letters in the lower. This gives Gill Sans a very different style of design to sans-serifs like, based on simple squares and circles, or designs like, Helvetica and influenced by nineteenth-century lettering styles. For example, compared to realist sans-serifs the 'C' and 'a' have a much less 'folded up' structure, with wider.
The 'a' and 'g' in the style are 'double-storey' designs, rather than the 'single-storey' forms used in handwriting and often found in grotesque and especially geometric sans-serifs. A drawing and photographed carving by Gill of the 'Trajan' capitals on the, a model for the capitals of Gill Sans and Johnson. Respected by Arts and Crafts artisans as among the best ever drawn, many signs and engravings created with an intentionally artistic design in the twentieth century in Britain are based on them.The upper-case of Gill Sans is partly modelled on Roman capitals like those found on the, with considerable variation in width. Had written that, 'The Roman capitals have held the supreme place among letters for readableness and beauty. They are the best forms for the grandest and most important inscriptions.' While Gill Sans is not based on purely geometric principles to the extent of the geometric sans-serifs that had preceded it, some aspects of Gill Sans do have a geometric feel. The J descends below the baseline.
The 'O' is an almost perfect circle and the capital 'M' is based on the proportions of a square with the middle strokes meeting at the centre; this was not inspired by Roman carving but is very similar to Johnston. The 'E' and 'F' are also relatively narrow. Distinctive characters of Gill Sans.The influence of traditional serif letters is also clear in the 'two-storey' lower-case 'a' and 'g', unlike that of Futura, and the 't' with its curve to bottom right and slanting cut at top left, unlike Futura's which is simply formed from two straight lines. The lower-case 'a' also narrows strikingly towards the top of its loop, a common feature of serif designs but rarer in sans-serifs.Following the traditional serif model the has different letterforms from the roman, where many sans-serifs simply slant the letters in what is called an style.
This is clearest in the 'a', which becomes a 'single storey' design similar to handwriting, and the lower-case 'p', which has a calligraphic tail on the left reminiscent of italics such as those cut by in the eighteenth century. The italic 'e' is more restrained, with a straight line on the underside of the bowl where serif fonts normally add a curve.
Like most serif fonts, several weights and releases of Gill Sans use to allow its expansive letter 'f' to join up with or avoid colliding with following letters.The basic letter shapes of Gill Sans do not look consistent across styles (or even in the metal type era all the sizes of the same style), especially in Extra Bold and Extra Condensed widths, while the style is effectively a different design altogether and was originally marketed as such. Digital-period Monotype designer Dan Rhatigan, author of an article on Gill Sans's development after Gill's death, has commented: 'Gill Sans grew organically. it takes a very 'asystematic' approach to type.
Very characteristic of when it was designed and of when it was used.' (At this time the idea that sans-serif typefaces should form a consistent family, with glyph shapes as consistent as possible between all weights and sizes, had not fully developed: it was quite normal for families to vary as seemed appropriate for their weight until developments such as the groundbreaking release of Univers in 1957.
)In the light weights, the slanting cut at top left of the regular 't' is replaced with two separate strokes. From the bold weight upwards Gill Sans has an extremely eccentric design of 'i' and 'j' with the dots smaller than their parent letter's stroke. The gloomy, ultra-bold sans-serifs of the. Gill and Johnston sought to create sans-serif designs that were modern and not as bold as these. Gill argued in his that such closed-up forms were counterproductively bold, less legible than lighter fonts of normal proportions.Morison commissioned Gill to develop Gill Sans after they had begun to work together (often by post since Gill lived in Wales) on Gill's serif design from 1925 onwards; they had known each other since about 1913.
Morison visited Cleverdon's bookshop while in Bristol in 1927 where he saw and was impressed by Gill's fascia and alphabet. Gill wrote that 'it was as a consequence of seeing these letters' that Morison commissioned him to develop a sans-serif family.In the period during and after his closest collaboration with Johnston, Gill had intermittently worked on sans-serif letter designs, including an almost sans-serif capital design in an alphabet for sign-painters in the 1910s, some 'absolutely legible-to-the-last-degree. Simple block letters' for in 1925 and some capital letter signs around his home in, Wales. Gill had greatly admired Johnston's work on their Underground project, which he later wrote had 'redeemed the whole business of sans-serif from its nineteenth-century corruption' of extreme boldness. Johnston apparently had not tried to turn the alphabet (as it was then called) that he had designed into a commercial typeface project. He had tried to get involved in type design before starting work on Johnston Sans, but without success since the industry at the time mostly created designs in-house.
Morison similarly respected the design of the Underground system, one of the first and most lasting uses of a standard lettering style as corporate branding (Gill had designed a set of serif letters for ), writing that it 'conferred upon the lettering a sanction, civic and commercial, as had not been accorded to an alphabet since the time of Charlemagne'. An American metal-type specimen sheet of 'Gill Title'. Note the original '5', '7', '0', and 'Q' in some sizes, which were dropped in many later metal type issues and digital versions, and a non-descending 'J'.Morison and Gill had met with some resistance within Monotype while developing Perpetua and while Morison was an enthusiastic backer of the project, Monotype's engineering manager and type designer was deeply unconvinced, commenting that he could 'see nothing in this design to recommend it and much that is objectionable'. (Pierpont was the creator of Monotype's previous mainstay sans-serif, a loose family now called. It is a much less sculptured design inspired by German sans-serifs. ) Morison also intervened to insist that the letters 'J' and 'Q' be allowed to elegantly descend below the, something not normal for titling typefaces which were often made to fill up the entire area of the metal type. In the early days of its existence it was not always consistently simply called 'Gill Sans', with other names such as 'Gill Sans-serif', 'Monotype Sans-Serif' (the latter two both used by Gill in some of his publications) or its order numbers (such as Series No.
231) sometimes used.A large amount of material about the development of Gill Sans survives in Monotype's archives and in Gill's papers. 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, who developed a final precise design and spacing) grappling with the challenge of creating a viable humanist sans-serif lower-case as well as an italic, which Johnston's design did not have. Gill's first draft proposed many slanting cuts on the ends of and descenders, looking less like Johnston than the released version did, and quite long descenders. Early art for the italic also looked very different, with less of a slope, again very long descenders.
The final version did not use the calligraphic italic 'g' Gill preferred in his serif designs Perpetua and (and considered in the draft italic art), instead using a standard 'double-storey' 'g'. Johnston (upper) and Gill Sans (lower), showing some of the most distinctive differences.In the regular or style of Gill Sans, some letters were simplified from Johnston, with diamond dots becoming round (rectangles in the later light weight) and the lower-case 'L' becoming a simple line, but the 'a' became more complex with a curving tail in most versions and sizes.
In addition, the design was simply refined in general, for example by making the horizontals slightly narrower than verticals so that they do not appear unbalanced, a standard technique in font design which Johnston had not used. The 'R' with its widely splayed leg is Gill's preferred design, unlike that of Johnston; historian has suggested that this may be inspired by an Italian Renaissance carving in the in London. Particular areas of thought during the design process were the 'a' (several versions and sizes in the hot metal era had a straight tail like Johnston's or a mildly curving tail) and the 'b', 'd', 'p' and 'q', where some versions (and sizes, since the same weight would not be identical at every size) had stroke ends visible and others did not. Rhatigan has commented that Monotype's archives contain 'enough material for a book just about the 'b', 'd', 'p', and 'q' of Gill Sans'.The titling capitals of Gill Sans were first unveiled at a printing conference in 1928; it was also shown in a specimen issued in the magazine edited by Morison. While initial response was partly appreciative, it was still considered dubious by some ultra-conservative printers who saw all sans-serif type as modern and unsound; one called it 'typographical '.
Sans-serifs were still regarded as vulgar and commercial by purists in this period: Johnston's pupil privately commented of them that:In Johnston I have lost confidence. Despite all he did for us. He has undone too much by forsaking his standard of the Roman alphabet, giving the world, without safeguard or explanation, his block letters which disfigure our modern life. His prestige has obscured their vulgarity and commercialism.Nonetheless, Gill Sans rapidly became popular after its release. Some of Gill's original art for Gill Sans, showing the original 'Q', punctuation and two.Gill Sans' technical production followed Monotype's standard method of the period.
The characters were drawn on paper in large plan diagrams by the experienced drawing office team, led and trained by Pierpont and Fritz Steltzer, both of whom Monotype had recruited from the German printing industry. The drawing staff who executed the design was disproportionately female and in many cases recruited from the local area and the nearby art school; they worked out many aspects of the final drawings including adaptations of the letters to different sizes and the spacing. The diagrams were then used as a plan for machining metal punches by to stamp, which would be loaded into a casting machine to cast type. It was Monotype's standard practice at the time to first engrave a limited number of characters and print proofs (some of which survive) from them to test overall and spacing on the page, before completing the remaining characters., Rhatigan and Gill's biographer Malcolm Yorke have all written that the drawing office's work in making Gill Sans successful has not been fully appreciated; Yorke described Gill as 'tactless' in his claims that the design was 'as much as possible mathematically measurable. As little reliance as possible should be placed on the sensibility of the draughtsmen and others concerned in its machine facture'. Reception. Gill Sans on a 1949 poster.Gill Sans rapidly became very popular.
Its success was aided by Monotype's sophisticated marketing, led by Gill's supporter (and sometime lover), and due to its practicality and availability for in a very wide range of sizes and weights.Despite the popularity of Gill Sans, some reviews have been critical., who knew Gill, wrote in his 1976 anthology examining Gill's lettering that the density of the basic weight made it unsuitable for extended passages of text, printing a passage in it as a demonstration. The regular weight has been used to print body text for some trade printing uses such as guides to countryside walks published by the LNER. Described it and Futura as 'fine in the capitals and bum in the lower-case' while proposing to create a more individualistic competitor, for Linotype around 1929.
Modern writers, including Stephen Coles and Ben Archer, have criticised it for failing to improve on Johnston and for unevenness of colour, especially in the bolder weights (discussed below). More generally, modern font designer has criticised Johnston and Gill's designs for rigidity, calling their work '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.”Gill broached the topic of the similarity with Johnston in a variety of ways in his work and writings, writing to Johnston in 1933 to apologise for the typeface bearing his name and describing Johnston's work as being important and seminal. However, in his, he proposed that his version was 'perhaps an improvement' and more 'fool-proof' than Johnston's. Johnston and Gill had drifted apart by the beginning of the 1920s, something Gill's groundbreaking biographer describes as partly due to the anti-Catholicism of Johnston's wife Greta., the managing director who commissioned Johnston's typeface, privately thought Gill Sans 'a rather close copy' of Johnston's work. Compilation image of some of the fonts of the Gill Sans family that are mostly intended for display use.
Detail differences are obvious, especially the 'single-storey' 'a' on Extra Condensed Bold.Following the initial success of Gill Sans, Monotype rapidly produced a wide variety of other variants. In addition, Monotype sold moulds for Gill Sans in very large sizes for their 'Supercaster' type-casting equipment. Popular with advertisers, this allowed end-users to cast their own type at a very competitive price. This made it a popular choice for posters. Gill's biographer Malcolm Yorke has described it as 'the essence of clarity for public notices'.Versions of Gill Sans were created in a wide range of styles such as condensed and shadowed weights. Several were released, including a capitals-only regular shadowed design and a light-shadowed version with deep relief shadows. In the metal type era, a 'cameo ruled' design that placed white letters in boxes or against a stippled black background was available.
The shadowed weights were intended to be used together with the regular, printing in different colours, to achieve a simple multicolour effect. Some of the decorative versions may predominantly have been designed by the Monotype office, with Gill examining, critiquing and approving the designs sent to him by post. The long series of extensions, redrawings and conversions into new formats of one of Monotype's most important assets (extending long beyond Gill's death) has left Gill Sans with a great range of alternative designs and releases.
A book weight was created in 1993 in between the light and regular weight, suitable for body text, along with a heavy weight. Gill Kayo. Gill's drawings of Gill Kayo. Its working title 'Sans Double Elefans' is visible at bottom left, and his 'EG' signature at bottom right.In 1936, Gill and Monotype released an extremely bold sans-serif named Gill Kayo (from KO, or, implying its aggressive build). This has often been branded as Gill Sans Ultra Bold, though in practice many letters vary considerably from Gill Sans. It is available in regular and condensed widths.
Gill, who thought of the design as something of a joke, proposed naming it 'Double Elefans'. Harling reviewed it as 'dismal' and sarcastically commented that 'typographical historians of 2000AD (which isn't, after all, so very far away) will find this odd outburst in Mr Gill's career, and will spend much time in attempting to track down this sad psychological state of his during 1936.' Forty years later he described it as 'the most horrendous and blackguardly of these display exploitations'. The design was begun in 1932; some of the first drawings may have been prepared by Gill's son-in-law Denis Tegetmeier. It made a return to popularity in the graphic design of the 1970s and 80s, when Letraset added a condensed weight.The boldest weights of Gill Sans, including Kayo, have been particularly criticised for design issues such as the eccentric design of the dots on the 'i' and 'j', and for their extreme boldness. (Gill Sans' standard weight is, as already noted, already quite bold by modern standards.
) Gill argued in his Essay on Typography that the nineteenth-century tendency to make sans-serif typefaces attention-grabbingly bold was self-defeating, since the result was compromised legibility. In the closing paragraph he ruefully noted his contribution to the genre:There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools.
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. Alternate characters in Gill Sans Nova, most or all based on those offered in the metal type era.Monotype developed a set of for Gill Sans to cater for differing tastes and national printing styles of different countries.
These include Futura-inspired designs of 'N', 'M', 'R', 'a', 'g', 't' and others, a four-terminal 'W' in the French renaissance style, a tighter 'R', a 'Q' in the nineteenth-century style with a tail that looped upwards (similar to that on among others, and preferred by the LNER), oblique designs as opposed to the standard true italic, a more curving, true-italic 'e' and several alternative numerals. In particular, in the standard designs for Gill Sans the numeral '1', upper-case 'i' and lower-case 'L' are all a simple vertical line, so an alternate '1' with a serif was sold for number-heavy situations where this could otherwise cause confusion, such as on price-lists. (Not all timetables used it: for example, the L.N.E.R. Preferred the simple version. ) Some early versions of Gill Sans also had features later abandoned, such as an unusual '7' matching the curve of the '9', a '5' pushing forwards, and a lower-case letter-height '0'.Gill was involved in the design of these alternates, and Monotype's archive preserves notes that he rethought the geometric alternates.
With the increasing popularity of Futura Gill Sans was not alone in being adapted: both Erbar and Dwiggins' Metro would undergo what historian has called a 'Futura-ectomy' to conform to taste. After Gill's death, Monotype created versions for the and alphabets. Monotype also added additional features not found in the metal type, notably and small capitals. Series and styles.
A paperback from 1949 compared to digital Gill Sans semi-bold, showing subtle differences in weight and spacing.The digital releases of Gill Sans fall into several main phases: releases before 2005 (which includes most bundled 'system' versions of Gill Sans), the 2005 Pro edition, and the 2015 Nova release which adds many alternate characters and is in part included with. In general characteristics for common weights the designs are similar, but there are some changes: for example, in the book weight the 2005 release used circular ij dots but the 2015 release uses square designs, and the 2015 release simplifies some ligatures.
Digital Gill Sans also gained character sets not present in the metal type, including text figures and.Like all metal type revivals, reviving Gill Sans in digital form raises several decisions of interpretation, such as the issue of how to compensate for the ink spread that would have been seen in print at small sizes more than larger. 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: 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 different font sizes varied as is normal for metal type, with wider spacing and other detail changes at smaller text sizes; other major sans-serif families such as Futura and Akzidenz-Grotesk are similar.
In the period Monotype continued to offer two or three sizes of master, but all of this subtlety was lost on transfer to digital. To replicate this, it is necessary to make manual adjustment to spacing to compensate for size changes, such as expanding the spacing and increasing the weight used at smaller sizes.Former president John Berry commented of Gill Sans' modernised spacing that 'both the regular weight and especially the light weight look much better when they're tracked loose'. In contrast, wrote in 1986 that he preferred the later spacing: 'the metal version.
Was spaced, I suspect, as if it were a serif face'. Gill Sans Nova (2015) As of 2019, Monotype's current digitisation of Gill Sans is Gill Sans Nova, by George Ryan. Gill Sans Nova adds many additional variants, including some of the previously undigitised versions, and an ultra-light weight which had been drawn for.
The fonts differ from Gill Sans MT (MT stands for Monotype) in their adoption of the hooked 1 as default, while the regular weight is renamed 'Medium'. Monotype celebrated the release with a London exhibition on Gill's work, as they had in 1958 to mark the general release of Gill's serif design Joanna. One addition was italic swash caps, which had been considered by Gill but never released.The family includes 43 fonts, including 33 text fonts in 9 weights and 3 widths, 6 inline fonts in 5 weights and 2 widths (1 in condensed), 2 shadowed fonts in 2 weights and 1 width, 1 shadowed outline font, 1 deco font. Characters set support includes W1G. The basic set of Regular, Light and Bold weights is bundled with in the user-downloadable 'Pan-European Supplemental Fonts' package.
Gill Sans on the nameplate of the locomotive. 1952 Jersey holiday events brochure, typical of the design style of the periodIn 1949 the decided on standard types of signs to be used at all stations. Lettering was to use the Gill Sans typeface on a background of the regional colour. Gill Sans was also used in much of its printed output, very often in capitals-only settings for signage. Specially drawn variations were developed by the Railway Executive (part of the ) for signs in its manual for the use of signpainters painting large signs by hand. Other users included ' iconic paperback jacket designs from 1935 and British official mapping agency. It was also used by for documents which could not be practically set in Johnston.
Paul Shaw, a historian of printing, has described it as a key element of the 'Modernist classical' style from the 1930s to the 1950s, that promoted clean, spare design, often with all-capitals and centred setting of headings.Gill Sans remains popular, although a trend away from it towards grotesque and neo-grotesque typefaces took place around the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of continental and American design. Typefaces that became popular around this time included original early 'grotesque' sans-serifs, as well as new and more elegant designs in the same style such as Helvetica and Univers. Mosley has commented that in 1960 'orders unexpectedly revived' for the old Monotype Grotesque design: 'it represents, even more evocatively than Univers, the fresh revolutionary breeze that began to blow through typography in the early sixties.' He added in 2007 'its rather clumsy design seems to have been one of the chief attractions to iconoclastic designers tired of the. Prettiness of Gill Sans'. As an example of this trend, and 's corporate rebranding of BR as British Rail in 1965 introduced Helvetica and Univers for printed matter and the custom but very similar for signage, and abandoned the classical, signage style with which Gill Sans is often associated.
Kinneir and Calvert's used a similar approach. Linotype and its designer, who had begun development on a planned Gill Sans competitor in 1955, first considered redrawing some letters to make it more like these faces before abandoning the design project (now named 'Magnus') around 1962-3.An additional development which reduced Gill Sans' dominance was the arrival of phototypesetting, which allowed typefaces to be printed from photographs on film and (especially in display use – hot metal continued for some body text setting for longer) massively increased the range of typefaces that could cheaply be used. Like had a similar effect for smaller projects; their sans-serif and 's exemplified the design trends of the period by choosing dense, industrial designs.
Of the period from the 1930s to 1950s, when he was growing up, James Mosley would later write:The Monotype classics dominated the typographical landscape. In Britain, at any rate, they were so ubiquitous that, while their excellent quality was undeniable, it was possible to be bored by them and to begin to rebel against the bland good taste that they represented. In fact we were already aware by 1960 that they might not be around to bore us for too long. The death of metal type.
Seemed at last to be happening.While extremely popular in Britain, and to a lesser extent in European printing, Gill Sans did not achieve popularity with American printers in the hot metal era, with most preferring gothic designs like and geometric designs like Futura and Monotype's own. Gill Sans therefore particularly achieved worldwide popularity after the close of the metal type era and in the phototypesetting and digital era, when it became a system font on computers. One use of Gill's work in the United States in this period, however, was a custom wordmark and logo made by Gill for in 1930 based on Gill Sans. Its editor had seen Gill's work in London.
The BBC logo at BBC Broadcasting House, BelfastThe adopted the typeface as its corporate typeface in 1997 for many but not all purposes, including on its. Explaining the change, designer said that 'by choosing a typeface that has stood the test of time, we avoid the trap of going down a modish route that might look outdated in several years' time'. The BBC had an earlier association with Gill, who created some sculptures on. Other more recent British organisations using Gill Sans have included (and initially its successor ), John Lewis and the, which adopted Gill Sans as the typeface for the definitive family of service books published from 2000. Notable non-British modern businesses using Gill Sans include (which commissioned a custom variant),.
British rock band has used Gill Sans in its logo. Used it until 2006, before changing it to after feeling that it was too in keeping with market research that people found the company 'monolithic'., the information design theorist, uses Gill Sans on his website and in some of his published works. The uses Gill Sans on its. Granby Elephant and Gill Kayo or Ultra Bold stylesGranby was a large family with condensed. It also included a 'Granby Elephant' weight influenced by Gill Kayo.Another similar but more eccentric design was created by Johnston's student Harold Curwen for the use of his family company, the of. Named 'Curwen Sans' or 'Curwen Modern', it has many similarities to Johnston also, and was occasionally used by London Transport in work printed by the Curwen Press.
Curwen described it as based on his time studying with Johnston in the 1900s, although it was not cut into metal until 1928, around the same time as Gill Sans was released, with a lower-case similar to that of Kabel. A digitisation by K-Type was released in 2018.Several intended Gill Sans competitors were developed during the period of its popularity but ultimately did not see mass release., who would later make extensive use of Gill Sans while designing books for, created a similar design for an early machine, which was at the time little-used but also since digitised. During the 1930s Dutch type designer, also a friend of Morison's, worked on a superfamily named Romulus, with serif and humanist sans-serif companion: the sans-serif, with a low x-height, never progressed beyond test proofs. As described above, Linotype began work in 1955 on a Gill Sans competitor, intended to be named 'Magnus'. Designed by the German type designer with input from British Linotype manager, the design was ultimately abandoned by 1963 for reasons of lack of manufacturing capacity and changing tastes, although it too reached test proofs.
Portions of this inter-war Polish advertisement are in Gill Sans using the 'continental' alternates resembling FuturaTypeface designs are in many countries, while in others such as the the design is out of copyright with 70 years passed since Gill's death in 1940, by which time the metal type family was essentially completed. This makes it legally permissible to create alternative digitised versions of Gill Sans (although not necessarily of later Monotype additions to the font such as the book weight and ). However, the name 'Gill Sans' remains a Monotype (no. 1340167 in the US) and therefore is not eligible to be used to name any derivative font. Although it is now common to classify Gill Sans and Futura as following separate directions in typeface design, humanist and geometric, this did not seem obvious to contemporary writers who often saw both as a new, more personalised development of the sans-serif letter. Some sources of the period distinguish sans-serifs into the 'grotesques' of the nineteenth century and the modern 'sans-serifs' of the twentieth, or similar classification structures.
writes that it is 'tempting to speculate' that this may have been Gill's idea even in the Johnston type, since it does not resemble Johnston's calligraphy, although there are naturally many past precedents for the design in signpainting and type. Morison had argued for the theory that an oblique made a better match than an italic to an upright font through offering less of a contrast to it.
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. Morison ultimately abandoned the idea and ruefully noted that had an italic that owed 'more to than dogma.' . This is necessary since the slanting cut would unbalance the letter if the stroke weights were lighter. Cleverdon retained the book of alphabets, which also included model serif capitals and lower-case, before selling it to the collection in 1967. The A&NS letters no longer survive and may not have been a finished project – they are known from a letter from Gill to his former assistant. Gill's friend also remembered Gill doing some work on sans-serif letters that he thought were a project for.
The sign-painter's alphabet had very small, similar to the capitals of and similar designs. 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. Some revivals of Johnston, such as a project by, the ITC digitisation and that used by have attempted to synthesise an italic or oblique for Johnston, but Johnston never created one. P22's revival declined to add one. This resulted in a design somewhat similar to of a few years later.
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