Style combination · Contrasts

British Road Signage × London Transport Design

Pick's Underground also held one public system together with a sans and a few colours, but surrounded it with commissioned artists' posters; the road signs allow no art at all, so choose London Transport when a system needs a cultural voice and the road signs when it must only inform.

From the research on British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert)

Mix them and make something British Road Signage London Transport Design

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from London Transport Design, their arrangement from British Road Signage, the finish from British Road Signage. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert) London Transport Design

Type from London Transport Design: Humanist sans
All caps
Colour from British Road Signage: Flat fields
Limited spot colours
Form from London Transport Design: Rectilinear
Emblems & badges
Composition from British Road Signage: Framed panels
Layered information
Surface from British Road Signage: Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · London Transport Design

Form

Fira Sans, standing in for Edward Johnston's Underground sans (1916): two weights, ordinary and a capitals-only bold, with capitals on Roman square-capital proportions and diagonally set square dots on i and j; condensed letters followed for bus destination displays

Text · British Road Signage

The national sign system Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert designed for Britain's motorways, first used on the Preston By-pass in 1958, and through the Worboys Committee for all roads from 1 January 1965. Place names are set in mixed case in their Transport lettering, spaced on tiles measured in stroke widths. Colour codes the road (blue motorway, green primary with yellow numbers, white local, brown for tourism from the mid-1980s), red triangles warn and circles command with Calvert's pictograms, and junctions are drawn as maps: a kit of parts written into law.

Inter; British Road Signage used Transport (Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, 1957–1963) and Motorway

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from British Road Signage, with a counter-accent from London Transport Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert) London Transport Design

#ffffff ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#ffd200 accent · 18%
#d0352b accent · 14%
#d6001c accent · 10%
#d9a441 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ffffff;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #ffd200;
  --accent-2: #d0352b;
  --accent-3: #d6001c;
  --accent-4: #d9a441;
  --font-display: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert): These signs carry legal force: the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions prescribe them, so borrow the method (mixed case, colour and shape codes, a kit of parts) but never make a look-alike that a road user could take for a real traffic sign. The lettering is licensed too: GDS Transport is reserved for GOV.UK services, and New Transport is a commercial typeface from A2-Type.

London Transport Design: The roundel is a registered trade mark of Transport for London, which licenses it: draw your own emblem rather than reproducing it. New Johnston, used exclusively by TfL, and its 2016 successor Johnston100, which TfL commissioned from Monotype, are TfL's corporate typefaces; Johnston's 1916 design has been out of copyright since 2015, and for the historic letter use P22 Underground, the revival the London Transport Museum licensed to P22, or another humanist sans, not TfL's fonts. Some commissions served empire, such as Bawden's poster for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, which the V&A describes as imperial propaganda that included human displays; do not reuse that imagery as neutral nostalgia.

The two styles

A blue, green and white road-style sign reads “Take a break” above a large parking symbol, a tree and a picnic table. Four smaller panels show toilets, a cup, cutlery and a fuel pump, with “2 miles” and a right-pointing arrow below.

1958–present · Western Europe British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert) The national sign system Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert designed for Britain's motorways, first used on the Preston By-pass in 1958, and through the Worboys Committee for all roads from 1 January 1965. Place names are set in mixed case in their Transport lettering, spaced on tiles measured in stroke widths. Colour codes the road (blue motorway, green primary with yellow numbers, white local, brown for tourism from the mid-1980s), red triangles warn and circles command with Calvert's pictograms, and junctions are drawn as maps: a kit of parts written into law. 1908–1966 · Western Europe London Transport Design The design programme Frank Pick built for London's Underground from 1908 and the London Passenger Transport Board (1933–40), continued by Harold Hutchison (1947–66). Fixed elements recurred across stations, notices and maps: Edward Johnston's humanist sans (1916), the red-ring-and-blue-bar roundel and Harry Beck's diagram (1933). Pick, an admirer of Morris and Lethaby, carried the craft ideal of 'fitness for purpose' into transport. Around those constants he commissioned lithographed posters from many artists, Kauffer, Bawden and Man Ray among them: varied art in one consistent system.