'Transport' is Beautiful

When I came back from hitch-hiking in Europe in the early nineties, I got to Dover and bought a coffee. I was given change, including a 50p. The weight of that old 50p told me I was home. After the small, tinny Francs, it felt like a familiar, well-worn worry stone.

Similarly, the weight and reassurance of the font used on road signs in Britain is like a comfort blanket to the British. No nonsense, like a stern but kind parent, the font points us in the right direction with a minimum of fuss. Although it feels ageless, it's actually quite modern. Originally commissioned in the fifties for the first motorways, the new signs were intended for the new breed of motorist who would be hurtling along in their Morris Minors at untold velocities - in excess of 60mph. They didn't have time to decipher the clunky, confused mix of signs that existed up until that point. They wanted a clear, quick explanation of their choices.

Jock Kinneir was commissioned to design the signs, and he recruited a design student, Margaret Calvert, to help him. As The Guardian points out, the choices they made were modern, yet reassuring for the essentially conservative British:

'The "Britishness" came from the gentle palette - creamy white on blue - and the earthy curves of the letters and symbols. Kinneir and Calvert designed a rounded version of the modern movement typeface Aksidenz Grotesk, which they named Transport. Rather than adopting the capital letters of most continental signs, they plumped for a mix of upper and lower case, believing that the British would find that friendlier and more legible. Look at one of their motorway signs and you'll see that even the tiniest details - from the curved corners of the rectangular frame to the rounded joints of the road "arrows" - were chosen to make the modernist rigour of Kinneir's rules more palatable to conservative British taste.'

Similarly, the pictorial signs were not harsh, but reassuring and strangely familiar.

'Calvert drew most of the pictograms in the friendly, curvaceous style of Transport. Many of her illustrations were inspired by aspects of her own life. The cow featured in the triangular sign warning drivers to watch out for farm animals on the road was based on Patience, a cow on her relatives’ Warwickshire farm. Eager to make the school children crossing sign more accessible, she replaced the image of a boy in a school cap leading a little girl, with one of a girl – modelled on a photograph of herself as a child – with a younger boy. Calvert described the old sign as being: “quite archaic, almost like an illustration from Enid Blyton… I wanted to make it more inclusive because comprehensives were starting up.''

Transport is, to use that hackneyed phrase, a 'design classic'. Hackneyed and inappropriate elsewhere, here it is true. It's design that works.

For more on Calvert, who's still alive, have a read of this Frieze interview, or click on the somewhat shallow Top Gear interview, below: