Westminster (not to be confused with Westminster Old Style) is a printing and display

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 ...

inspired by the machine-readable numbers printed on

cheque A cheque, or check (American English; see spelling differences) is a document that orders a bank (or credit union) to pay a specific amount of money from a person's account to the person in whose name the cheque has been issued. The pers ...

sWestminster (Microsoft)
/ref> and designed by Leo Maggs.
''Luc Devroye''. Retrieved on 9 May 2016. In the 1960s, Leo Maggs was working at the Hazell Sun Group's design studio in Covent Garden,

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

. At that time, he was commanded to create a futuristic style title for an article of ''About the House'' (the magazine of The Friends of

Covent Garden Opera House The Royal Opera House (ROH) is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply Covent Garden, after a previous use of the site. It is the home of The Royal Ope ...

). Maggs based the letters of that title on the

MICR Magnetic ink character recognition code, known in short as MICR code, is a character recognition technology used mainly by the banking industry to streamline the processing and clearance of cheques and other documents. MICR encoding, called the '' ...

(magnetic ink character recognition) system, E-13B, used on bank cheques. He then continued to design the rest of the letters of the alphabet in his spare time, basing their proportions on that of the

Gill Sans Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards. Gill Sans is based on Edward Johnston's 1916 "Underground Alphabet", the corporate font of London Underground. ...

typeface.The truth about Westminster (the font!)
MERCER DESIGN The MICR E-13B font was designed for automated reading by a very simple magnetic reader in the early days of automatic character recognition. The weight of strokes in the characters can be recognised as "light" or "heavy" by a simple circuit and these patterns then map directly to the bit patterns of a computer character set. This made the characters practical to read before 'smart' OCR, but limited the length of the character set. E-13B has only 14 characters: the numeric digits and a few control codes. None of the alphanumeric 'computer' typefaces like Westminster could be read magnetically. The work was presented to

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 ...

, who declined to buy it, but soon after released their own rival typeface, Data 70. Other contemporary typefaces based on E-13B include Moore Computer (recognisable by its dots underneath the letters M and N), Gemini, Orbit-B, and Countdown. Later, Typodermic released another derivative, Minicomputer. Robert Norton, founder of the Photoscript Ltd photo-typesetting company, decided to produce Westminster. The font was named by Norton and, according to Microsoft, received its name from

Westminster Bank Westminster Bank was a British retail bank which operated in England and Wales from 1834 until its merger into the National Westminster Bank in 1970; it continued to exist as a dormant registered non-trading company until 4 July 2017 when it ...

Limited (now

NatWest National Westminster Bank, commonly known as NatWest, is a major retail and commercial bank in the United Kingdom based in London, England. It was established in 1968 by the merger of National Provincial Bank and Westminster Bank. In 2000, it ...

) in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

because it helped fund the font's production. The font was included with Microsoft software after Microsoft hired Norton.

Usage

Since its design, the typeface has been strongly associated with computers, especially in the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s. The font is used frequently to indicate computer involvement in television series, films, books, and comics.

References

Display typefaces Microsoft typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in the 1960s NatWest Group {{Typography-stub

Usage

See also

References