Were it not for Stanley Morison, the Gill Sans® would never have seen printer’s ink. During the early twentieth century, Morison’s commanding personality, lofty scholarship, and control over which fonts were developed at Monotype made him one of the most powerful forces in modern typeface development. After reviving several classical type styles to serve as the foundation of the new Monotype typeface library, Morison wanted to develop a truly modern face, one that could compete with the deluge of sans serif designs being released by German foundries as a result of the overwhelming success of the Futura design.

An Underground Influence

The signage alphabet for the London Underground system was created by the famous British calligrapher, Edward Johnston. During the period in which this well-known project was being developed, Johnston was working with a young apprentice named Eric Gill.

Several years later, as Morison was hatching his plan to release a British counterpart to Futura, he saw lettering by Gill that used many of the same letterforms as Johnston’s sans serif font. It struck Morison that a typeface based on this alphabet would be highly marketable. Morison decided that Eric Gill was the ideal man for the job.

Reading Gill Sans

Gill Sans has a relatively small x-height, smaller than Futura and a lot smaller than the Helvetica® or Frutiger® designs. A generous x-height is usually considered one of the prerequisites for a typeface to rank high on the legibility scale, but Gill Sans is an exception. Because the characters of the Gill Sans alphabet are based on classic roman letterforms and not geometric shapes, they are remarkably legible.

Gill Sans also has a more pronounced contrast in stroke widths than most serifless fonts, making the design more appealing to the eye, and ultimately more readable than its monoweight cousins. Rounding out the practical benefits of Gill Sans: The face is space-economical. More information can be set in a given space when using Gill Sans than with most other sans serif designs.

Gill Sans: Then & Now

As originally released in metal type, Gill Sans is a big family, sprawling across some 36 derivatives. Many of these were created by the Monotype drawing office, with input by Gill as a consultant to the design project. Today, digital versions are available for over two dozen of the best original Gill Sans designs. The complete offering is only available in the Monotype® Library.

One reason for the enduring success of Gill Sans is the fact that each weight retains a distinct character of its own. The light font, with its heavily kerned ‘f’ and tall ‘t’, has an open, elegant look. The regular font has a more compact and muscular appearance, with its flat-bottomed ‘d’, flat-topped ‘p’ and ‘q’, and short, triangular-topped ‘t.’ The bold font tends to echo the softer, more open style of the light, while the extra bold and ultra bold have their own vivid personalities.

All the related fonts of the Gill Sans family work well together, but they were not “mechanically” produced from a single design as was the case with the Helvetica and Univers® designs. Gill Sans reflects Eric Gill’s craftsmanship ethos, even though the design was developed by “industrialized” methods - the result is an entire family of true typographic gems.

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