The creator of the hugely influential London Underground typeface – which celebrates its centenary this year – was a modest typographic puristAs ubiquitous as the black cab and the double-decker bus,so omnipresent in the city it is practically invisible, the London Underground typeface celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2016. To mark the centenary, and a Sussex village,where this most metropolitan of lettering was dreamed up, is putting on a note.
Edward Johnston, and who created the typeface in 1916,moved to Ditchling, at the foot of the rolling South Downs, and in 1912 at the behest of Eric Gill,his friend and former student. Gill had relocated there in the hope of establishing something of an artists’ commune, founded on medieval arts and crafts traditions – a area, or as he put it,where “life and work and treasure and the bringing up of a family and clothes and social virtues and food and houses and games and songs and books should all be in the soup together”.
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Source: theguardian.com