39 Facts About 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.

In 1926, Douglas Cleverdon, a young printer-publisher, opened a bookshop in Bristol, and Gill painted a fascia for the shop for him in sans-serif capitals.

Gill Sans was commissioned to develop his alphabet into a full metal type family by his friend Stanley Morison, an influential Monotype executive and historian of printing.

Gill Sans was released in 1928 by Monotype, initially as a set of titling capitals that was quickly followed by a lower-case.

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Gill Sans'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.

Gill Sans soon became used on the modernist, deliberately simple covers of Penguin Books, 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 Helvetica" 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 style.

Upper-case of Gill Sans is partly modelled on Roman capitals like those found on the Column of Trajan, with considerable variation in width.

Basic letter shapes of Gill Sans do not look consistent across styles, especially in Extra Bold and Extra Condensed widths, while the Ultra Bold style is effectively a different design altogether and was originally marketed as such.

Gill Sans 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 and Gill Sans 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 was deeply unconvinced, commenting that he could "see nothing in this design to recommend it and much that is objectionable".

Large amount of material about the development of Gill Sans survives in Monotype's archives and in Gill's papers.

The final version did not use the calligraphic italic "g" Gill Sans preferred in his serif designs Perpetua and Joanna, instead using a standard "double-storey" "g".

Gill Sans-serifs were still regarded as vulgar and commercial by purists in this period: Johnston's pupil Graily Hewitt privately commented of them that:.

Robert Harling, who knew Gill Sans, wrote in his 1976 anthology examining Gill Sans'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.

Gill Sans 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.

Johnston and Gill Sans had drifted apart by the beginning of the 1920s, something Gill Sans's groundbreaking biographer Fiona MacCarthy describes as partly due to the anti-Catholicism of Johnston's wife Greta.

Versions of Gill Sans were created in a wide range of styles such as condensed and shadowed weights.

Gill Sans, who thought of the design as something of a joke, proposed naming it "Double Elefans".

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 was involved in the design of these alternatives, and Monotype's archive preserves notes that he rethought the geometric alternatives.

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.

Digital releases of Gill Sans fall into several main phases: releases before 2005, the 2005 Pro edition, and the 2015 Nova release which adds many alternativecharacters and is in part included with Windows 10.

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Digital Gill Sans gained character sets not present in the metal type, including text figures and small capitals.

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.

The LNER promoted their rebranding by offering Gill a footplate ride on the Flying Scotsman express service; he painted for it a signboard in the style of Gill Sans, which survives in the collection of the St Bride Library.

Gill Sans was used in much of its printed output, very often in capitals-only settings for signage.

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.

An additional development which reduced Gill Sans' dominance was the arrival of phototypesetting, which allowed typefaces to be printed from photographs on film and massively increased the range of typefaces that could cheaply be used.

Notable non-British modern businesses using Gill Sans include United Colours of Benetton, Tommy Hilfiger and Saab Automobile.

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.

Several intended Gill Sans competitors were developed during the period of its popularity but ultimately did not see mass release.

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.

Rowton Sans is inspired by Gill but has a nearly upright italic, similar to that used by Gill in his serif font Joanna.

Hypatia Gill Sans, designed by Thomas Phinney and released by Adobe, was intended to be a more characterful humanist sans design.

Martin Majoor's FF Scala Sans is a popular example of this influenced by Gill's work; others include Charlotte Sans and Serif by Michael Gills for Letraset, Mr and Mrs Eaves by Zuzana Licko, are based on Baskerville, and Dover Sans and serif by Robin Mientjes, based on Caslon.

K22, a foundry in Quezon City operated by the designer "Toto G", has released two Gill Sans shadowed variants as K22 EricGill Shadow and K22 EricGill Shadow Line, an inline variant, for free for "personal, private and non-commercial purposes" and for sale for commercial use.