JOHNSTON
P22 TYPE FOUNDRY
JOHNSTON
P22 TYPE FOUNDRY
Languages
Styles
Designers
Latin languages Polytonic and monotonic Greek Slavic and asiatic cyrillic
ORIGINAL LONDON UNDERGROUND
Edward Johnston Miguel Sousa Tiffany Wardle Eben Sorkin Chris Lozos Андрій Шевченко Νατάσα Ραϊσάκη Εύα Μασούρα
LONDON Underground bold
P22 Underground Pro Thin P22 Underground Pro Light P22 Underground Pro Book P22 Underground Pro Medium P22 Underground Titling A P22 Underground Titling B
P22 Underground Titling C P22 Underground Pro Demi P22 Underground Pro Heavy
P22 Underground Titling Pro
A DEMOCRATIC TYPEFACE
P22 Johnston Underground
Johnston's typeface, created for London's tube 100 years ago and still in use, is an overlooked triumph of modernist design article by Douglas Murphy, first appeared on t̎ he Guardian ̎, 29th July 2013
P22 Underground Pro Light weight: 24pt leading: 24pt
It’s more than 150 years since steam trains started ploughing underneath the streets of London on what was then called the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first urban underground line. Quietly, something equally vital to the enduringly iconic status of London’s tube is marking its anniversary: 100 years ago, Frank Pick, commercial manager of The Underground Group, commissioned typographer Edward Johnston to design a new typeface for all signage on the railways.
P22 Underground Pro Heavy weight: 8pt leading: 12pt
It’s hard to express quite how visually confusing the Edwardian metropolis was: advertising was plastered onto every available surface, the signs and posters themselves clogged with all manner of complicated type and clutter. To walk around the city back then was to wade through floods of information, immersed in a chaotic whirl of pedestrians, horse and tram traffic – the acceleration of the metropolis, brought about by the rise of industrial capitalism in the middle of the 19th century, was reaching dizzying speeds. The “Underground” typeface itself was a calm, rational, tranquil insertion into this increasingly complex world. Designed to absolutely not be mistaken for advertising, its proportions were based upon Roman precedents, with perfectly circular “o”s, while it utilised a quirky diagonal dot for periods, “i”s and “j”s. Most notably, it’s a sans serif, meaning that it lacks the little flicks and terminations that adorn typical Latin alphabets. And while sans serifs do date back to ancient Europe, their use as a way to simplify, declutter and rationalise graphics on such a scale was unheard of – as Pick put it, the new type’s character had “the bold simplicity of the authentic lettering of the finest periods”, but was also “belonging unmistakably to the 20th century”. In fact, Johnston marks the beginning of one of the most successful modernist design projects of the early 20th century. From the outset, modernism was a two-headed project; artists, writers and designers were thrilled by the vertiginous accelerations of the capitalist metropolis, but were concerned with finding a proper way to navigate them. For every futurist manifesto, revelling in the vortex, there was an attempt to use new design languages as a way to provide better conditions for all. After the introduction of the typeface in 1916, Pick, an enlightened despot of a client with a magnificent passion for design, introduced the world-famous bullseye logo,
P22 Underground Pro Demi weight: 8pt leading: 12pt
P22 Underground Pro Medium weight: 8pt leading: 12pt
and by the 1920s commissioned architect Charles Holden to design a series of stations, most notably Piccadilly Circus, and the UK’s very first skyscraper, 55 Broadway. Lastly, in 1933 Harry Beck’s simplified tube map completed this triumphant set of design classics. It’s a shame however that this particular modernism is generally not taken quite as seriously as the Bauhaus in Germany, the constructivists of Soviet Union, or many of the other avant-garde groups of the time. Because it didn’t sweep away all before it, perhaps because the design and
P22 Underground Pro Book weight: 8pt leading: 12pt
buildings weren’t quite shocking enough, the huge success of Pick, Johnston and Holden’s London modernism isn't held in quite the same high esteem. But in ensuing years almost all undergrounds and transit systems would adopt a version of this approach, and it would eventually permeate industrial and graphic design almost totally. Johnston's pupil Eric Gill would develop gill sans, one of the most elegant sans serif typefaces around, and eventually Switzerland’s Max Miedinger would give us the all-conquering helvetica in 1957, perhaps the world's most frequently encountered text. The spirit of this quotidian modernism was also visible in the “isotype” visual language developed by Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz in Vienna in the 1930s, and later in Romek Marber’s grid of 1961, a layout standard that ushered in the classic era of Penguin book design.
P22 Underground Pro Light weight: 8pt leading: 12pt
In almost all these cases there’s a strong leftist current – Pick was a staunch social democrat and champion of the welfare state, Neurath and Arntz were movers in interwar “Red Vienna”, while the Pelican series of popular books on weighty subjects look now to be a high point of postwar culture, when radical authors such as RD Laing, John Berger or Marshall McLuhan could write bestselling paperbacks for the everyday audience. In a way this democratic design is a victim of its own success – we now hardly notice that clarity of signage and instruction as we move through the contemporary metropolis, which is exactly as it was meant to be. But travel around in London and you can't help but notice that the Beck tube map is groaning under its own weight, its crystalline clarity almost gone, while with his cable car Boris Johnson has re-introduced corporate sponsorship to something explicitly designed to avoid it. And in the coming world of augmented reality, of “Google glass”, who knows for how much longer we’ll even need systems of signage that treat each and every citizen equally?
P22 Underground Pro Thin weight: 8pt leading: 12pt
JOHNSTON UNDERGROUND PRO HEAVY 52pt
UNDERGROUND UNDERGROUND PRO DEMI 52pt
TYPEFACE UNDERGROUND PRO MEDIUM 52pt
LONDON UNDERGROUND PRO BOOK 52pt
P22 FOUNDRY UNDERGROUND PRO LIGHT 52pt
EXPANDED UNDERGROUND PRO THIN 52pt
Edward Johnston, a British calligrapher and lettering artist, was asked to create a typeface with “bold simplicity” that was truly modern yet rooted in tradition. Johnston’s design combined classical Roman proportions with humanist warmth. UNDERGROUND PRO HEAVY 8/12pt
“Underground” - later known as “Johnston” - was circulated as a lettering guide for sign-painters and also made into wood and metal type for posters, signs, and other publicity materials used throughout London’s transport network. UNDERGROUND PRO DEMI 8/12pt
Johnston himself only drew one weight of the typeface. He based its weight and proportions on seven diamond-shaped strokes of a pen stacked in a row. This gesture even shows up in the characteristic diamond used as the tittle of the “i” and “j”. UNDERGROUND PRO MEDIUM 8/12pt
Johnston’s type became a distinctive feature of the Underground brand over the years, but by the late 70s it was less practical to use the old wood and metal fonts. In 1979 design agency Banks. UNDERGROUND PRO BOOK 8/12pt
P22 Type Foundry released its faithful, officially licensed version of Johnston’s original in 1997, also offering a number of lively graphic elements such as ornaments and borders that draw on TfL's rich visual history. UNDERGROUND PRO LIGHT 8/12pt
P22 expands on the design and features of the original Johnston Underground fonts (which was available into two weights: regular and bold) adding six new weights supporting Latin, Greek and Cyrillic languages and a set of graphic glyphs. UNDERGROUND PRO THIN 8/12pt
196pt
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96pt
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P22 Underground Pro Heavy
P22 Underground Titling A 30pt 48pt 72pt
P22 Underground Titling C 30pt 48pt 72pt
P22 Underground Titling B 30pt 48pt 72pt
P22 Underground Titling A 30pt 48pt 72pt
P22 Underground Titling C 30pt 48pt 72pt
P22 Underground Titling B 30pt 48pt 72pt
Qq Aa Ll Ww Gg Ii:. P22 Underground Pro Book weight: 144pt Regular
S01
Qq Aa :: Gg Ww
P22 Underground Pro Book weight: 48pt Stylistic Set 1 - Petite Capitals
S02
Qq Aa :: Gg Ww
P22 Underground Pro Book weight: 48pt Stylistic Set 2 - Dryad Cap Alternates
S03
Qq Aa :: Gg Ww
P22 Underground Pro Book weight: 48pt Stylistic Set 3 - Humanistic Alts. #1
S04
Qq Aa :: Gg Ww
P22 Underground Pro Book weight: 48pt Stylistic Set 4 - Humanistic Alts. #2
S05
S06
Qq Aa :: Gg Ww Qq Aa :: Gg Ww
P22 Underground Pro Book weight: 48pt Stylistic Set 6 - Diamond Points
UNDERGROUND PRO GLYPHS - LATIN
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EXTRAS
CYRILLIC
UNDERGROUND PRO GLYPHS - GREEK
Each P22 Underground Pro font weight collectively contains over 5000 glyphs, here's a collection of some of them.
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FRANCESCO D’AGOSTINO