Style combination · Pairs well

London Transport Design × Vorticism

Set a Vorticist field of angular planes under calm, evenly spaced lettering for a poster that has machine-age energy but still reads as a public service.

From the research on Vorticism & BLAST Typography

Mix them and make something London Transport Design Vorticism

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

London Transport Design Vorticism & BLAST Typography

Type from Vorticism: Grotesque & neo-grotesque
All caps

London Transport Design avoids grotesque & neo-grotesque: this is where the two pull against each other.
Colour from London Transport Design: Flat fields
Limited spot colours
Form from London Transport Design: Rectilinear
Emblems & badges
Composition from Vorticism: Extreme scale contrast
Dynamic asymmetry
Surface from Vorticism: Carved line
Flat

The type

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

Display · Vorticism

Orbit

Archivo Black; Vorticism used Grotesque No. 9 (Stephenson Blake), the heavy jobbing grotesque of most of BLAST's manifesto pages and Latin Bold for the boxed section numerals of the manifesto

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 London Transport Design, with a counter-accent from Vorticism. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

London Transport Design Vorticism & BLAST Typography

#f4f1e8 ground · 36%
#1c1c1c ink · 14%
#d0352b accent · 18%
#e8b62c accent · 14%
#e2388f accent · 10%
#00782a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f4f1e8;
  --ink: #1c1c1c;
  --accent-1: #d0352b;
  --accent-2: #e8b62c;
  --accent-3: #e2388f;
  --accent-4: #00782a;
  --font-display: "Archivo Black", 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

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. 1914–1920 · Western Europe Vorticism & BLAST Typography London's short-lived rival to Futurism, launched by Wyndham Lewis with BLAST (dated 20 June 1914; War Number, July 1915). Its manifesto pages shout lists to BLAST and BLESS in a heavy jobbing grotesque, in level lines of jumping sizes, staggered between vertical rules and boxed numerals. Some lists are centred like a playbill, and the jobbing printer William Henry Leveridge may have done some or all of the layout. The pictures are interlocking angular planes of machines, docks and cities, cut in wood or drawn for line blocks in flat black and white, beside halftone plates of paintings.