Gill Sans is a
humanist
Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.
The meaning of the term "human ...
sans-serif
In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...
typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are list of type ...
designed by
Eric Gill
Arthur Eric Rowton Gill, (22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' describes Gill as ″the greatest artist-cra ...
and released by the British branch of
Monotype
Monotyping is a type of printmaking made by drawing or painting on a smooth, non-absorbent surface. The surface, or matrix, was historically a copper etching plate, but in contemporary work it can vary from zinc or glass to acrylic glass. The ...
from 1928 onwards.
Gill Sans is based on
Edward Johnston
Edward Johnston, CBE (11 February 1872 – 26 November 1944) was a British craftsman who is regarded, with Rudolf Koch, as the father of modern calligraphy, in the particular form of the broad-edged pen as a writing tool.
He is most fa ...
's 1916
"Underground Alphabet", the corporate font of
London Underground
The London Underground (also known simply as the Underground or by its nickname the Tube) is a rapid transit system serving Greater London and some parts of the adjacent ceremonial counties of England, counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and He ...
. As a young artist, Gill had assisted Johnston in its early development stages. In 1926,
Douglas Cleverdon
Thomas Douglas James Cleverdon (17 January 1903 – 1 October 1987) was an English radio producer and bookseller. In both fields he was associated with numerous leading cultural figures.
Personal life
He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and ...
, a young printer-publisher, opened a bookshop in
Bristol
Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city 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
Stanley Morison
Stanley Arthur Morison (6 May 1889 – 11 October 1967) was a British typographer, printing executive and historian of printing. Largely self-educated, he promoted higher standards in printing and an awareness of the best printing and typefaces o ...
, 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 "
geometric" style, which included
Erbar,
Futura and
Kabel, 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
Roman inscriptions to create a design that looked both cleanly modern and classical at the same time. 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
London and North Eastern Railway
The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) was the second largest (after LMS) of the " Big Four" railway companies created by the Railways Act 1921 in Britain. It operated from 1 January 1923 until nationalisation on 1 January 1948. At th ...
(LNER) chose it for all its posters, timetables and publicity material.
British Railways
British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most of the overground rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the Big Four British rai ...
chose Gill Sans as the basis for its standard lettering when the
railway companies
This is an incomplete list of the world's railway operating companies listed alphabetically by continent and country. This list includes companies operating both now and in the past.
In some countries, the railway operating bodies are not compani ...
were nationalised in 1948. Gill Sans also soon became used on the modernist, deliberately simple covers of
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.[Helvetica
Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.
Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...]
" 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
humanist
Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.
The meaning of the term "human ...
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
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
software and
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
.
Characteristics
![Gill Sans compared to other sans-serifs](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Gill_Sans_compared_to_other_sans-serifs.png)
The proportions of Gill Sans stem from
monumental Roman capitals in the upper case, and traditional
"old-style" serif letters in the lower. This gives Gill Sans a very different style of design to
geometric sans-serifs like
Futura, based on simple squares and circles, or
grotesque or "industrial" designs like
Akzidenz-Grotesk
Akzidenz-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family originally released by the Berthold Type Foundry of Berlin. ''german: label=none, italic=no, "Akzidenz"'' indicates its intended use as a typeface for commercial print runs such as publicity, tic ...
, Helvetica and
Univers
Univers () is a large sans-serif typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger and released by his employer Deberny & Peignot in 1957. Classified as a neo-grotesque sans-serif, one based on the model of nineteenth-century German typefaces such a ...
influenced by nineteenth-century lettering styles.
For example, compared to grotesque sans-serifs the "C" and "a" have a much less "folded up" structure, with wider
apertures
In optics, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels. More specifically, the aperture and focal length of an optical system determine the cone angle of a bundle of rays that come to a focus in the image plane.
An ...
.
The "a" and "g" in the
roman or regular style are "double-storey" designs, rather than the "single-storey" forms used in handwriting and
blackletter
Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norweg ...
often found in grotesque and especially geometric sans-serifs.
![Trajan (2959610060)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Trajan_%282959610060%29.jpg)
The upper-case of Gill Sans is partly modelled on Roman capitals like those found on the
Column of Trajan
Trajan's Column ( it, Colonna Traiana, la, Columna Traiani) is a Roman triumphal column in Rome, Italy, that commemorates Roman emperor Trajan's victory in the Dacian Wars. It was probably constructed under the supervision of the architect Apo ...
, with considerable variation in width.
Edward Johnston
Edward Johnston, CBE (11 February 1872 – 26 November 1944) was a British craftsman who is regarded, with Rudolf Koch, as the father of modern calligraphy, in the particular form of the broad-edged pen as a writing tool.
He is most fa ...
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.
![Gill Sans exemplar 2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Gill_Sans_exemplar_2.png)
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
italic has different letterforms from the roman, where many sans-serifs simply slant the letters in what is called an
oblique
Oblique may refer to:
* an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / )
*Oblique angle, in geometry
*Oblique triangle, in geometry
* Oblique lattice, in geometry
* Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the b ...
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
William Caslon
William Caslon I (1692/1693 – 23 January 1766), also known as William Caslon the Elder,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was an English typefounder. The distinction and legibility of his type secured him the patronage of the leading ...
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
ligatures 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
Ultra Bold 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 ...
ttakes 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 (
tittle
A tittle or superscript dot is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic in the form of a dot on a letter (for example, lowercase ''i'' or ''j''). The tittle is an integral part of the glyph of ''i'' and ''j'', but dot (diacritic), diacri ...
s) smaller than their parent letter's stroke.
Development
![West Brompton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/West_Brompton.jpg)
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
Perpetua
Perpetua and Felicity ( la, Perpetua et Felicitas) were Christian martyrs of the 3rd century. Vibia Perpetua was a recently married, well-educated noblewoman, said to have been 22 years old at the time of her death, and mother of an infant son s ...
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
Army and Navy Stores in 1925 and some capital letter signs around his home in
Capel-y-ffin
Capel-y-ffin ('' en, Chapel of the Boundary'') is a hamlet near the English-Welsh border, a couple of miles north of Llanthony in Powys, Wales. It lies within the Black Mountains and within the Brecon Beacons National Park. The nearest town is H ...
, 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
WH Smith
WHSmith (also written WH Smith, and known colloquially as Smith's and formerly as W. H. Smith & Son) is a British retailer, headquartered in Swindon, England, which operates a chain of high street, railway station, airport, port, hospital and ...
), writing that it "conferred upon
he letteringa sanction, civic and commercial, as had not been accorded to an alphabet since the time of Charlemagne".
![Gill Sans Q, punctuation and manicules (22065785558)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Gill_Sans_Q%2C_punctuation_and_manicules_%2822065785558%29.jpg)
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
Frank Hinman Pierpont
Frank Hinman Pierpont (born 1860, New Haven, Connecticut – died 11 February 1937, England) was an American engineer and typeface designer. He worked primarily in England for the Monotype Corporation of Britain.
After training as a mechani ...
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
Monotype Grotesque
Monotype Grotesque is a family of sans-serif typefaces released by the Monotype Corporation for its hot metal typesetting system. It belongs to the grotesque or industrial genre of early sans-serif designs. Like many early sans-serifs, it forms ...
. 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
baseline, 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
Salfords
Salfords ) is a village in the borough of Reigate and Banstead in Surrey, England. It lies approximately south of Redhill on the A23 London to Brighton road. The village is within the civil parish of Salfords and Sidlow which covers a popu ...
Surrey
Surrey () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South East England, bordering Greater London to the south west. Surrey has a large rural area, and several significant urban areas which form part of the Greater London Built-up Area. ...
, 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
ascenders 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 and
swash capitals
A swash is a typography, typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, entry stroke, etc., on a glyph.
The use of swash characters dates back to at least the 16th century, as they can be seen in Ludovico Vicentino degli A ...
.
The final version did not use the calligraphic italic "g" Gill preferred in his serif designs Perpetua and
Joanna
Joanna is a feminine given name deriving from from he, יוֹחָנָה, translit=Yôḥānāh, lit=God is gracious. Variants in English include Joan (given name), Joan, Joann, Joanne (given name), Joanne, and Johanna. Other forms of the name in ...
(and considered in the draft italic art),
instead using a standard "double-storey" "g".
In the regular or
roman
Roman or Romans most often refers to:
*Rome, the capital city of Italy
*Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD
*Roman people, the people of ancient Rome
*''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a letter ...
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
James Mosley
James Mosley (born 1935) is a retired librarian and historian whose work has specialised in the history of printing and letter design.
The main part of Mosley's career has been 42 years as Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, wher ...
has suggested that this may be inspired by an Italian Renaissance carving in the
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...
in London.
![PencilToPixel - 25 (8713318369)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/PencilToPixel_-_25_%288713318369%29.jpg)
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
aterialfor 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 ''
Fleuron'' 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
Bolshevism
Bolshevism (from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, fo ...
".
Sans-serifs were still regarded as vulgar and commercial by purists in this period: Johnston's pupil
Graily Hewitt
William Graily Hewit or Graily Hewitt (1864–1952) was a British novelist and calligrapher, second only to Edward Johnston in importance to the revival of calligraphy in the country at the turn of the twentieth century.
Biography
Hewitt wa ...
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.
Gill Sans' technical production followed Monotype's standard method of the period. The characters were drawn mirrored 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; 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
pantograph
A pantograph (, from their original use for copying writing) is a mechanical linkage connected in a manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a second pen. If a line dr ...
to stamp
matrices
Matrix most commonly refers to:
* ''The Matrix'' (franchise), an American media franchise
** ''The Matrix'', a 1999 science-fiction action film
** "The Matrix", a fictional setting, a virtual reality environment, within ''The Matrix'' (franchis ...
, 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
balance of colour and spacing on the page, before completing the remaining characters.
Walter Tracy
Walter Valentine Tracy RDI (14 February 1914 – 28 April 1995) was an English type designer, typographer and writer.
Biography
Walter Tracy was born in Islington, London and attended Shoreditch Secondary school. At the age of fourteen he wa ...
, 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
![Whitley Bay British Railways Poster](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Whitley_Bay_British_Railways_Poster.jpg)
Gill Sans rapidly became very popular. Its success was aided by Monotype's sophisticated marketing, led by Gill's supporter
Beatrice Warde, and due to its practicality and availability for
machine composition in a very wide range of sizes and weights.
Despite the popularity of Gill Sans, some reviews have been critical.
Robert Harling, 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.
William Addison Dwiggins
William Addison Dwiggins (June 19, 1880 – December 25, 1956), was an American type designer, calligrapher, and book designer. He attained prominence as an illustrator and commercial artist, and he brought to the designing of type and books so ...
described it and Futura as "fine in the capitals and bum in the lower-case" while proposing to create a more individualistic competitor,
Metro
Metro, short for metropolitan, may refer to:
Geography
* Metro (city), a city in Indonesia
* A metropolitan area, the populated region including and surrounding an urban center
Public transport
* Rapid transit, a passenger railway in an urba ...
, 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
Jonathan Hoefler
Jonathan Hoefler (; born August 22, 1970) is an American typeface designer. Hoefler founded the Hoefler Type Foundry in 1989, a type foundry in New York.
Early life
Jonathan Hoefler was born on August 22, 1970, in New York City to Doreen Ben ...
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 ''
Essay on Typography'', 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
Fiona MacCarthy
Fiona MacCarthy (23 January 1940 – 29 February 2020) was a British biographer and cultural historian best known for her studies of 19th- and 20th-century art and design.
Early life and education
Fiona MacCarthy was born in Sutton, Surrey in ...
describes as partly due to the anti-Catholicism of Johnston's wife Greta.
Frank Pick
Frank Pick Hon. RIBA (23 November 1878 – 7 November 1941) was a British transport administrator. After qualifying as a solicitor in 1902, he worked at the North Eastern Railway, before moving to the Underground Electric Railways Compan ...
, the
Underground Electric Railways Company
The Underground Electric Railways Company of London Limited (UERL), known operationally as the Underground for much of its existence, was established in 1902. It was the holding company for the three deep-level "tube"A "tube" railway is an und ...
managing director who commissioned Johnston's typeface, privately thought Gill Sans "a rather close copy" of Johnston's work.
Expansion and new styles
![Gill Sans display fonts](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Gill_Sans_display_fonts.png)
Following the initial success of Gill Sans, Monotype rapidly produced a wide variety of other variants.
In addition, Monotype sold moulds (
matrices
Matrix most commonly refers to:
* ''The Matrix'' (franchise), an American media franchise
** ''The Matrix'', a 1999 science-fiction action film
** "The Matrix", a fictional setting, a virtual reality environment, within ''The Matrix'' (franchis ...
) 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
shadowed designs 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 Sans Extra Bold Kayo (21630545464)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Gill_Sans_Extra_Bold_Kayo_%2821630545464%29.jpg)
In 1936, Gill and Monotype released an extremely bold sans-serif named Gill Kayo (from KO, or
knockout
A knockout (abbreviated to KO or K.O.) is a fight-ending, winning criterion in several full-contact combat sports, such as boxing, kickboxing, muay thai, mixed martial arts, karate, some forms of taekwondo and other sports involving striking, a ...
, implying its aggressive build). This has often been branded as Gill Sans Ultra Bold, though in practice many letters vary considerably from Gill Sans.
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.
Alternative characters
![Gill Sans Nova alternates](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Gill_Sans_Nova_alternates.png)
Monotype developed a set of
alternative characters 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
Century
A century is a period of 100 years. Centuries are numbered ordinally in English and many other languages. The word ''century'' comes from the Latin ''centum'', meaning ''one hundred''. ''Century'' is sometimes abbreviated as c.
A centennial or ...
among others, and used 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 alternative "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. used 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 alternatives, and Monotype's archive preserves notes that he rethought the geometric alternatives.
With the increasing popularity of Futura Gill Sans was not alone in being adapted: both Erbar and Dwiggins' Metro would undergo what historian
Paul Shaw has called a "Futura-ectomy" to conform to taste.
After Gill's death, Monotype created versions for the
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
and
Cyrillic
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = G ...
alphabets. Monotype also added additional features not found in the metal type, notably
text figures
Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...
and small capitals.
Series and styles
![Gill Sans Bold mirrored](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Gill_Sans_Bold_mirrored.jpg)
According to Rhatigan and other sources, by the end of the metal type period Gill Sans had been released in the following styles (not all sold at the same time):
*Gill Sans Titling (1928, series 231)
*Gill Sans (1930, series 262, sometimes called Gill Sans Medium)
*Gill Sans Bold (1930, series 275)
*Gill Sans Shadow Line (1931, series 290)
*Gill Sans Shadow Titling (1931, series 304)
*Gill Sans Bold Titling (1931, series 317)
*Gill Sans Extra Bold (1931, series 321)
*Gill Sans Light (1931, series 362)
*Gill Sans Shadow (1932, series 338)
*Gill Sans Bold Condensed (1932, series 343)
*Gill Sans 5pt (1932, series 349, sometimes called Gill Sans No. 2)
*Gill Sans Bold 5pt (1932, series 350, sometimes called Bold No. 2)
*Gill Sans Poster (1932, series 353)
*Gill Sans Bold Condensed Titling (1933, series 373)
*Gill Sans Cameo (1934, series 233)
*Gill Sans Cameo Ruled (1935, series 299)
*Gill Sans Shadow No. 1 (1936, series 406)
*Gill Sans Shadow No. 2 (1936, series 408)
*Gill Sans Ultra Bold (1936, series 442)
*Gill Sans Bold Extra Condensed (1937, series 468)
*Gill Sans Condensed (1937, series 485, sometimes called Medium Condensed)
*Gill Sans Bold No. 3 (1937, series 575)
*Gill Sans Bold Condensed Titling (1939, series 525)
*Gill Sans Extra Bold Titling (1939, series 526)
*Gill Sans Light 5pt (1958, series 662, sometimes called Light No. 2)
Titling series were capitals-only.
Phototypesetting
Monotype offered Gill Sans on film in the
phototypesetting
Phototypesetting is a method of setting type. It uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper.
It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing (digital typesetting).
Th ...
period. The fonts released in 1961 included Light 362, Series 262, Bold 275, Extra Bold 321, Condensed 343, all of which were released in film matrix sets "A" (6–7 points) and "B" (8–22, 24 points).
Infant and rounded versions
Monotype created an
infant version of Gill Sans using single-storey "a" and "g", and other more distinguishable characters such as a rounded "y", seriffed "1" and lower-case "L" with a turn at the bottom.
Infant designs of fonts are often used in education and toys as the letters are thought to be more recognisable to children being based on handwriting, and are often produced to supplement popular families such as Gill Sans, Akzidenz-Grotesk and
Bembo
Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the " old-style" of serif fonts, with its regular or roman style based on a design cut a ...
.
Monotype also created a version with rounded stroke ends for
John Lewis
John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was an American politician and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for from 1987 until his death in 2020. He participated in the 1960 Nashville ...
for use on toys.
Digital releases
![Gill Sans comparison](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Gill_Sans_comparison.png)
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 alternative
characters and is in part included with
Windows 10
Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
.
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
small capitals
In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. This is technicall ...
.
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
optical size
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design.
In mod ...
s: 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
phototype * Phototype can refer to a metal printing block, sometimes prepared using photogravure to reproduce a photograph in printing. The block may be a halftone image.
* Phototype can also refer to type set using a phototypesetting process to prepare pa ...
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
ATypI
The ATypI () or Association Typographique Internationale (the International Typography Association) is an international non-profit organisation dedicated to typography and type design. The primary activity of the association is an annual fall confe ...
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,
Walter Tracy
Walter Valentine Tracy RDI (14 February 1914 – 28 April 1995) was an English type designer, typographer and writer.
Biography
Walter Tracy was born in Islington, London and attended Shoreditch Secondary school. At the age of fourteen he wa ...
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
inline versions,
stylistic alternates and an ultra-light weight which had been drawn for ''
Grazia
''Grazia'' (; Italian for ''Grace'') is a weekly women's magazine that originated in Italy with international editions printed in Albania, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Colombia, France, Germany. Greece, Indonesia, I ...
''.
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
Windows 10
Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
in the user-downloadable "Pan-European Supplemental Fonts" package.
Usage
![LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard Nameplate](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/LNER_Class_A4_4468_Mallard_Nameplate.jpg)
First unveiled in a single uppercase weight in 1928, Gill Sans achieved national prominence almost immediately, when it was chosen the following year to become the standard typeface by the LNER railway company, soon appearing on every facet of the company's identity, from metal locomotive nameplates and hand-painted station signage to printed restaurant car menus, timetables and advertising posters.
The LNER promoted their rebranding by offering Gill (who was fascinated with railway engines) a footplate ride on the ''
Flying Scotsman'' express service; he also painted for it a signboard in the style of Gill Sans, which survives in the collection of the
St Bride Library.
![1952 Jersey holiday events brochure](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/1952_Jersey_holiday_events_brochure.jpg)
In 1949 the
Railway Executive
Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a prep ...
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
British Transport Commission
The British Transport Commission (BTC) was created by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government as a part of its nationalisation programme, to oversee railways, canals and road freight transport in Great Britain (Northern Ireland had the se ...
) for signs in its manual for the use of signpainters painting large signs by hand. Other users included
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.[Ordnance Survey
, nativename_a =
, nativename_r =
, logo = Ordnance Survey 2015 Logo.svg
, logo_width = 240px
, logo_caption =
, seal =
, seal_width =
, seal_caption =
, picture =
, picture_width =
, picture_caption =
, formed =
, preceding1 =
, di ...]
.
It was also used by
London Transport 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: "
trepresents, 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,
Jock Kinneir
Richard "Jock" Kinneir (11 February 1917 – 23 August 1994) was a British typographer and graphic designer who, with his colleague Margaret Calvert, designed many of the road signs used throughout the United Kingdom, Crown Dependencies, an ...
and
Margaret Calvert
Margaret Vivienne Calvert (born 1936) is a British typographer and graphic designer who, with colleague Jock Kinneir, designed many of the road signs used throughout the United Kingdom, Crown Dependencies, and British Overseas Territories, as w ...
's corporate rebranding of BR as British Rail in 1965 introduced Helvetica and Univers for printed matter and the custom but very similar
Rail Alphabet
Rail Alphabet is a typeface designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert for signage on the British Rail network. First used at Liverpool Street station, it was then adopted by the Design Research Unit (DRU) as part of their comprehensive 1 ...
for signage, and abandoned the classical,
all caps
In typography, all caps (short for "all capitals") refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters, for example: "THIS TEXT IS IN ALL CAPS". All caps may be used for emphasis (for a word or phrase). They are commonly seen in ...
signage style with which Gill Sans is often associated. Kinneir and Calvert's
road signage redesign used a similar approach.
Linotype and its designer
Hermann Zapf, 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.
Dry transfer
Dry transfers (also called rub-ons or rubdowns) are decals that can be applied without the use of water or other solvent. The decal itself is on a backing material such as paper or plastic sheeting much like a transparency. The dry transfer is ...
s like
Letraset
Letraset was a company known mainly for manufacturing sheets of typefaces and other artwork elements using the dry transfer method. Letraset has been acquired by the Colart group and become part of its subsidiary Winsor & Newton.
Corporate histor ...
had a similar effect for smaller projects; their sans-serif
Compacta and
Stephenson Blake's
Impact
Impact may refer to:
* Impact (mechanics), a high force or shock (mechanics) over a short time period
* Impact, Texas, a town in Taylor County, Texas, US
Science and technology
* Impact crater, a meteor crater caused by an impact event
* Impac ...
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
Franklin Gothic
Franklin Gothic and its related faces are a large family of sans-serif typefaces in the industrial or grotesque style developed in the early years of the 20th century by the type foundry American Type Founders (ATF) and credited to its head desi ...
and geometric designs like Futura and Monotype's own
Twentieth Century
The 20th (twentieth) century began on
January 1, 1901 (1901, MCMI), and ended on December 31, 2000 (2000, MM). The 20th century was dominated by significant events that defined the modern era: Spanish flu, Spanish flu pandemic, World War I and ...
.
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
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
computers and
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...
. One use of Gill's work in the United States in this period, however, was a custom wordmark and logo made by Gill for
''Poetry'' magazine in 1930 based on Gill Sans. Its editor
Harriet Monroe had seen Gill's work in London.
The
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
adopted the typeface as its corporate typeface in 1997 for many but not all purposes, including on its
.
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".
This was not Gill's only association with the BBC, as he had designed sculptures and other artwork that are on display at the broadcaster's London headquarters,
. In 2017, the BBC began to phase out Gill Sans in favour of a proprietary corporate font family, "Reith" (named after its first general manager
, and did not require licensing for continued use. The font was adopted by the BBC's corporate logo in 2021.
family of service books published from 2000.
has used Gill Sans in its logo.
.
, as some numbers (such as "6" and "9") are more easily distinguishable. Some old Express Lift buttons also use the font. In 2017,
uses Gill Sans Ultra Bold in their logo, albeit its letter "O" was stylized to a square, akin to a
.
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
. It is also used on
.
, influenced by Gill Sans, Johnston and Futura.
; it has a diamond-dot design like Johnston. 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
. 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.
machine, which was at the time little-used but also since digitised.
, 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
, the design was ultimately abandoned by 1963 for reasons of lack of manufacturing capacity and changing tastes, although it too reached test proofs.
Besides similar fonts, many signs and objects made in Britain during the period of Gill Sans' dominance, such as the ''
'' poster, received hand-painted or custom lettering similar to Gill Sans.
during the war used a standard set of letters similar to it.
they were based on it.
Another little-known follower was the NEN 3225 standard lettering, a project by the Dutch Standards Institute to create a set of standardised lettering for public use in the Netherlands, comprising a sans-serif similar to Gill Sans and a companion serif font drawn by
. The project was begun in 1944 but not published until 1963, and ultimately did not become popular.
The category of humanist sans-serif typefaces, which Gill Sans helped to define, saw great attention during the 1980s and 1990s, especially as a reaction against the overwhelming popularity of Helvetica and Univers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Modern sans-serif designs inspired by Gill often adapt the concept by creating a design better proportioned and spaced for body text, a wider and more homogeneous range of weights, something easier since the arrival of the computer due to the use of
or interpolated font design, or more irregular and hand-drawn in style.
and Volker Küster's Today Sans are modern variations; Tankard commented on the genre's eclipse that his aim was to create "the first commercial typeface with an English feel since Gill Sans".
Rowton Sans is inspired by Gill but has a nearly upright italic, similar to that used by Gill in his serif font Joanna.
More distantly, Arthur Vanson's Chesham Sans is inspired by the British tradition of sans-serif signpainting, with many similarities to Gill's work.
Humanist 521 was an unofficial digitisation, to which its Russian licensee ParaType added a Cyrillic version in 1997.
and Fontsite also released Gill Sans digitisations under different names including 'Chantilly', 'Gibson' and others.
More loosely,
by Hans Eduard Meier is similar in some ways. Released in 1968 and praised by Tschichold, it was intended to be a more dynamic, handwriting-influenced sans-serif form.
Its italic is, however, more of an oblique than Gill's.
Hypatia Sans, designed by Thomas Phinney and released by Adobe, was intended to be a more characterful humanist sans design.
Many other fonts are influenced by Gill Sans to some extent.
: a serif font and a matching humanist sans-serif with similar letterforms.
and Dover Sans and serif by Robin Mientjes, based on Caslon.
in 2015, as a screen-optimised sans-serif font intended to complement (but not exactly match) Gill's serif design Joanna.
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.
No complete, direct open-source Gill Sans clone has yet been released. One of the most extensive is Gillius, a derivative by the
project and designer Hirwen Harendal, which includes bold, italic, condensed and condensed bold styles. It is not a pure clone, but rather partly created by modifying
, and adds influences from geometric fonts particularly visible in the design of the "w". K22, a foundry in
operated by the designer "Toto G", has released two Gill Sans shadowed variants as K22 EricGill Shadow (digitising the Gill Sans Shadow 338 design) and K22 EricGill Shadow Line, an inline variant, for free for "personal, private and non-commercial purposes" and for sale for commercial use. A direct clone of the medium weight, Sans Guilt, was released by Brussels open source design group OSP in 2011, but it contains several obvious glitches such as misaligned "w" and "x" characters.
. ''Twentieth Century Type Designers''. W.W. Norton, 1995. .
* Johnson, Jaspert & Berry. ''Encyclopedia of Type Faces''. Cassell & Co, 2001. .
* Ott, Nicolaus, Friedl Fredrich, and Stein Bernard. ''Typography and Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Throughout History''. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. 1998, .
* Ovenden, Mark. ''Johnston and Gill: Very British Types''. Lund Humphries. 2016,
''The Fleuron'' (shows the first rare alternate 'R' with shorter leg, 5 without a vertical and 7 with curving leg)
* Monotype Recorder, Winter 1933 special issue:
*
(example of using a regular and shadowed design together to achieve a multicolour effect)
– while London Transport has historically used Johnston for signs, the more widely available Gill Sans was also often used for printed material
{{Eric Gill