To celebrate 100 years of the iconic London Underground typeface, designed by Edward Johnston in 1916
As with Pick’s original brief to Johnston, TfL’s brief to Monotype was simple to say but deceptively difficult to achieve: Ignore New Johnston. See if it is possible to go back to Johnston’s original typeface and work from that. Take it as the base, fill in the gaps and add then add the extra weights now needed to use Johnston effectively online, on mobile and elsewhere.
The results of Monotype’s effort is the newly-christened Johnston100 which has added two new weights, thin and extra thin and has a number of other technical tweaks that set the typeface up properly for modern usage.
The johnston typeface presence expands beyond in stations to digital mediums including apps and social media, the updated typeface known as Johnston100 contains subtle changes to make it fit for purpose in the 21st century. This includes never-before designed symbols, such as # and @, which are now widely used in an environment where digital communications are as important as print.
Johnston100 Hairline and Johnston100 Extra-thin
Johnston100 Thin, Johnston100 Regular and Johnston100 Medium
Interestingly the biggest way in which the typeface had changed over the years, however, was in its width. The Monotype team discovered that, over the years, Johnston had gradually become narrower. The changes were always marginal and thus it wasn’t obvious from revision to revision. Comparing the current iteration of New Johnston with Edward Johnston’s original work though it was surprisingly clear that over the course of its hundred year history the difference was substantial. Johnston100 restores much of the original width, and the overlayed text below shows just how noticable the difference is.
Overlaying Johnston100 over New Johnston highlights the differences in character width. Notice the far wider ‘h’.
When looking and comparing the Johnston sans, New Johnson and Johnson 100 you can see the development in the design of from Johnson Sans typeface to the New Johnson typeface the developed the x-height, width and height ratio, weight of the letters and default spacing between. Also Eiichi Kono used the diamond shape for the punctuation for the New Johnston typeface. From the New Johnston typeface to the Johnston 100 typefaces has developed the weights of the letters similar to the Johnston sans typeface, the addition of new characters sure to social media developments with to use of the # and the @. Johnston 100 typeface kept the diamond shape for the punctuation.
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