Flights of Fancy: how a modest calligrapher inspired the Johnston Scarf
It’s not always the boldest extroverts who go on to stamp their mark on history. Take Edward Johnston (1872-1944), the modest, mild-mannered calligrapher who would shape how we navigate one of the most famous public transport systems in the world, the London Underground.
To start us off on our underground journey, let’s take a look at some dates and figures to set the scene for Johnston’s entry into the modern design books. When the first underground steam-powered railway line was opened on 10th January 1863 (a 3.75 mile journey from Paddington to Kings Cross), its wooden carriages transported 38,000 passengers on the first day alone. In the first twelve months 9.5 million passengers used the service, increasing to 12 million the following year. Its success led to many tenders for new lines and by 1907 the network was fully electrified. The first escalators were installed at Earl’s Court in 1912 … by which point it’s estimated that roughly 300-400 million passengers were using the system. That’s a lot of bodies wandering around looking for the right platform.
Coincidentally, 1912 is the same year that the post of Commercial Manager was created, taken on by Frank Pick. A solicitor by training, Pick also happened to have a strong eye for design and publicity, and set about revolutionising the debt-ridden system and how the public navigated it. The previously separate underground companies all used varying typefaces to direct passengers – our knowledge of how important continuity and clarity is for signage in public spaces has since advanced greatly (influenced by designers such as Johnston), but at that time signage followed no such rules. Decorative and elaborate Edwardian signage was attractive but not always instantly clear or legible and quickly became lost in a sea of commercial advertising.
Enter Edward Johnston, medical student dropout, craftsman by nature. He gave up his medical studies in Edinburgh and made the move to London to study under W R Lethaby, an architect and architectural historian as well as an influencer of the Arts & Crafts movement and precursor of the modern movement. With Lethaby’s encouragement, Johnston began to study manuscript writing held at the British Museum, then took up a teaching post at the Central School of Art in 1899. He taught sculptor Eric Gill in 1901 who became a friend, both Gill and Johnston families eventually moving to Ditchling in 1912.
In 1906 Johnston published his influential ‘Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering’, which would go on to have a major impact on the field of lettering and established the modern calligraphy movement. When Pick cast his eye around for someone to help him modernise and develop a consistent visual identity through a standardised typeface, Johnston, the ultimate purist, must have seemed like a natural choice. In 1913, Pick commissioned him to design an official typeface known as Underground Railway Block, with the brief to distil a crisp new alphabet that had “the bold simplicity of the authentic lettering of the finest periods and yet belonging unmistakably to the 20th century”. The result was Johnston Sans, along with the iconic bullseye design.
Let’s not go into what makes the typeface so perfect (the jaunty diamond-shaped dot for the “i”s and “j”s, the pleasing shapes of the curves and round letters), or how Gill would go on to rip off (sorry, heavily base) the design for his own commercial typeface, Gill Sans. The directional arrow that came with the typeface is the icing on the cake for me, the ultimate instant visual recognition motif. It became known as the ‘Mexican arrow’, possibly for the reason that it takes elements from the Aztec Huichol ‘prayer-arrow’. The motif was used from the mid-1920s to the 1970s, characterised by a distinctive, broad arrow shape featuring distinct “flights” (feathers) on its tail.
From 1929-1931, four flights to the arrow were used. By c1932 it was used with three flights (used in the Johnston scarf pattern) and later decades saw the number gradually drop to two, then one and finally none.
Did Johnston care that Gill’s typeface became more heavily used? It seems not, this modest man was not one for the limelight. When it came to submitting his biography for Who’s Who, he simply wrote: “Studied pen shapes of letters in early MSS, British Museum, 1898-99. Teacher of the first classes in formal penmanship and lettering, LCC Central School, 1899-1912”.
The Museum Knits scarf pattern gives instructions for three different sizes and is worked in stranded knitting colourwork with a 3-stitch stocking-stitch border, using Isager Merilin. The arrows are deliberately pointing upwards towards the head, intended to capture positive energy and direct it towards the brain!