GILL SANS Eric Gill, 1928 Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards. Gill Sans is based on Edward Johnston's 1916 "Underground Alphabet", the corporate font of London Underground. As a young artist, Gill had assisted Johnston in its early development stages. In 1926, Douglas Cleverdon, a young printer-publisher, opened a bookshop in Bristol, and Gill painted a fascia for the shop for him in sans-serif capitals. In addition, Gill sketched an alphabet for Cleverdon as a guide for him to use for future notices and announcements. By this time Gill had become a prominent stonemason, artist and creator of lettering in his own right and had begun to work on creating typeface designs. While it is considered by many to be quintessentially British in tone and concept, has been used in virtually every country and in nearly every application imaginable. Gill Sans has reached this level of near ubiquity for one simple and very good — reason: it is an exceptionally distinctive design with a potential range of use that is almost limitless. It is used by designers all over the world in fashion industry, technology industry. The BBC adopted the typeface as its corporate typeface in 1997 for many but not all purposes, including on its logo. Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface that looks similar to Scala Sans. Gill Sans has a relatively small X-height in comparison with other sans serif fonts. A generous X-height is usually considered a prerequisite for a high legibility typeface, but Gill Sans seems to be an exception. Gill Sans is also essentially the only sans serif typeface without modular use of strokes. The "O" is a perfect circle, and the oblique and vertical strokes as well as upstrokes and downstrokes have a consistent thickness. Only "a", "e" and "g" have thinner strokes at the openings of the small eyes. These exceptions to an otherwise consistent
stroke thickness are one of the trademarks of the Gill Sans typeface. Unlike other popular sans serif fonts such as Arial and Verdana, the Gill Sans typeface uses a double storey lowercase "g". This has a distinctive eyeglass shape, which is easily recognisable. "c," "e" and "f" have vertical stroke ends, creating the effect of the strokes thinning towards the ending. The sources used are: 1. https://owlcation.com/humanities/gill-sans-typeface 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gill_Sans 3. https://www.fonts.com/font/monotype/gill-sans