Style combination · Pairs well

Legible City Wayfinding × London Transport Design

The parent: Legible London is a TfL system in TfL's New Johnston that extends the Underground's single-system idea from stations to the streets between them; borrow the discipline of one family repeated everywhere.

From the research on Legible City Wayfinding (Heads-Up Pedestrian Maps)

Mix them and make something Legible City Wayfinding London Transport Design

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from London Transport Design, their arrangement from Legible City Wayfinding, the finish from Legible City Wayfinding. 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.

Legible City Wayfinding (Heads-Up Pedestrian Maps) London Transport Design

Type from London Transport Design: Humanist sans
All caps
Colour from Legible City Wayfinding: Flat fields
Pastel
Form from London Transport Design: Rectilinear
Emblems & badges
Composition from Legible City Wayfinding: Layered information
Framed panels
Surface from Legible City Wayfinding: 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 · 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.

Fira Sans; London Transport Design used Edward Johnston's Underground sans (1916) and Poster artists' own hand-drawn lettering on lithographed pictorial posters

The colours

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

Legible City Wayfinding (Heads-Up Pedestrian Maps) London Transport Design

#f2f1ec ground · 36%
#2b3640 ink · 14%
#ffd100 accent · 18%
#d0352b accent · 14%
#a9c8de accent · 10%
#d9a441 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f2f1ec;
  --ink: #2b3640;
  --accent-1: #ffd100;
  --accent-2: #d0352b;
  --accent-3: #a9c8de;
  --accent-4: #d9a441;
  --font-display: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

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 wayfinding poster headed “Explore Nearby” shows a circular street map with waterways, green parks, landmark icons, and dashed five- and ten-minute walking rings around a yellow location marker. A legend sits at the upper right, with walking times and directions to four destinations along the bottom.

1999–present · Western Europe, North America, Global / networked Legible City Wayfinding (Heads-Up Pedestrian Maps) City-wide pedestrian wayfinding in which the sign is a map. Free-standing totems such as Legible London's Monolith, Midilith and Minilith carry 'heads-up' maps turned to the way the reader faces, a 'you are here' point ringed by a five-minute walking circle (fifteen minutes on the larger planner maps), and key landmarks drawn as small buildings on a flat street plan (in three dimensions in Bristol and London). A calm sans, high-contrast panels and one identifying accent, such as London's yellow top strip, make a single system of streets, stations, bus shelters and printed maps. 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.