Гилл Санс: История и влияние британского шрифта.

Humanist sans serif typeface family developed by Monotype

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. Gill was commissioned to develop his alphabet into a full metal type family by his friend Stanley Morison, an influential Monotype executive and historian of printing. Morison hoped that it could be Monotype's competitor to a wave of German sans serif families in a new "geometric" style, which included Erbar, Futura and Kabel, all being launched to considerable attention in Germany during the late 1920s. Gill Sans was released in 1928 by Monotype, initially as a set of titling capitals that was quickly followed by a lower case. Gill's aim was to blend the influences of Johnston, classic serif typefaces and Roman inscriptions to create a design that looked both cleanly modern and classical at the same time. Designed before setting documents entirely in sans serif text was common, its standard weight is noticeably bolder than most modern body text fonts. An immediate success, the year after its release the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) chose it for all its posters, timetables and publicity material. British Railways chose Gill Sans as the basis for its standard lettering when the railway companies were nationalised in 1948. Gill Sans also soon became used on the modernist deliberately simple covers of Penguin Books and was sold up to very large sizes, which were often used in British posters and notices of the period. Gill Sans was one of the dominant typefaces in British printing in the years after its release and remains extremely popular. It has been described as "the British Helvetica" because of its lasting popularity in British design. Gill Sans has influenced many other typefaces and helped to define a genre of sans serif, known as the humanist style. Monotype rapidly expanded the original regular or medium weight into a large family of styles, which it continues to sell. A basic set is included with some Microsoft software and macOS.

The proportions of Gill Sans stem from monumental Roman capitals in the upper case, and traditional "old style" serif letters in the lower. This gives Gill Sans a very different style of design to geometric sans serifs like Futura, based on simple squares and circles, or grotesque or "industrial" designs like Akzidenz Grotesk, Helvetica and Univers influenced by nineteenth century lettering styles. For example, compared to grotesque sans serifs the "C" and "a" have a much less "folded up" structure, with wider apertures. The "a" and "g" in the roman or regular style are "double storey" designs, rather than the "single storey" forms used in handwriting and blackletter often found in grotesque and especially geometric sans serifs. [[File:Trajan (2959610060). jpg|thumb|left|A drawing and photographed carving by Gill of the "Trajan" capitals on Trajan's Column in Rome, a model for the capitals of Gill Sans and Johnson. Respected by Arts and Crafts artisans as among the best ever drawn, many signs and lettering projects created with an intentionally artistic design are based on them. The lower case "a" also narrows strikingly towards the top of its loop, a common feature of serif designs but rarer in sans serifs. Following the traditional serif model the italic has different letterforms from the roman, where many sans serifs simply slant the letters in what is called an oblique style. This is clearest in the "a", which becomes a "single storey" design similar to handwriting, and the lower case "p", which has a calligraphic tail on the left reminiscent of italics such as those cut by William Caslon in the eighteenth century. Morison ultimately abandoned the idea and ruefully noted that Times New Roman had an italic that owed "more to Didot than dogma." Like most serif fonts, several weights and releases of Gill Sans use ligatures to allow its expansive letter "f" to join up with or avoid colliding with following letters. Digital period Monotype designer Dan Rhatigan, author of an article on Gill Sans's development after Gill's death, has commented: "Gill Sans grew organically  [it] takes a very 'asystematic' approach to type. Very characteristic of when it was designed and of when it was used." (At this time the idea that sans serif typefaces should form a consistent family, with glyph shapes as consistent as possible between all weights and sizes, had not fully developed: it was quite normal for families to vary as seemed appropriate for their weight until developments such as the groundbreaking release of Univers in 1957.) In the light weights, the slanting cut at top left of the regular "t" is replaced with two separate strokes. From the bold weight upwards Gill Sans has an extremely eccentric design of "i" and "j" with the dots smaller than their parent letter's stroke.

thumb|left|Gill's drawings of Gill Kayo. Its working title "Sans Double Elefans" is visible at bottom left, and his "EG" signature at bottom right. In 1936, Gill and Monotype released an extremely bold sans serif named Gill Kayo (from KO, or knockout, implying its aggressive build). This has often been branded as Gill Sans Ultra Bold, though in practice many letters vary considerably from Gill Sans. Harling reviewed it as "dismal" and sarcastically commented that "typographical historians of 2000AD (which isn't, after all, so very far away) will find this odd outburst in Mr Gill's career, and will spend much time in attempting to track down this sad psychological state of his during 1936." Forty years later he described it as "the most horrendous and blackguardly of these display exploitations". The boldest weights of Gill Sans, including Kayo, have been particularly criticised for design issues such as the eccentric design of the dots on the "i" and "j", and for their extreme boldness.) Gill argued in his Essay on Typography that the nineteenth century tendency to make sans serif typefaces attention grabbingly bold was self defeating, since the result was compromised legibility. In the closing paragraph he ruefully noted his contribution to the genre: There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools. I myself am responsible for designing five different sorts of sans serif letters – each one thicker and fatter than the last because each advertisement has to try and shout down its neighbours.

thumb|Lettering on an Eastern Region of British Railways sign. While the lettering is clearly based on Gill Sans, some letters such as the R are very different. The Sheffield type foundry Stephenson Blake rapidly released a commercial competitor named Granby, influenced by Gill Sans, Johnston and Futura. Granby was a large family with condensed and inline styles; it has a diamond dot design like Johnston. It also included a "Granby Elephant" weight influenced by Gill Kayo. Another similar but more eccentric design was created by Johnston's student Harold Curwen for the use of his family company, the Curwen Press of Plaistow. Named "Curwen Sans" or "Curwen Modern", it has many similarities to Johnston also, and was occasionally used by London Transport in work printed by the Curwen Press. Curwen described it as based on his time studying with Johnston in the 1900s, although it was not cut into metal until 1928, around the same time as Gill Sans was released, with a lower case similar to that of Kabel. Several intended Gill Sans competitors were developed during the period of its popularity but ultimately did not see mass release. Jan Tschichold, who would later make extensive use of Gill Sans while designing books for Penguin, created a similar design for an early phototypesetting machine, which was at the time little used but also since digitised. thumb|Enamel sign at Lowestoft Central station in British Railways standard lettering. The right hand side of the legs of the "R"s are straight rather than Gill's smooth curve. Besides similar fonts, many signs and objects made in Britain during the period of Gill Sans' dominance, such as the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, received hand painted or custom lettering similar to Gill Sans. Fighter Command during the war used a standard set of letters similar to it. Matthew Carter, later a prominent font designer, recalled in 2005 that when his mother cut linoleum block letters for him to play with during the Blitz they were based on it. Another little known follower was the NEN 3225 standard lettering, a project by the Dutch Standards Institute to create a set of standardised lettering for public use in the Netherlands, comprising a sans serif similar to Gill Sans and a companion serif font drawn by Jan van Krimpen. The project was begun in 1944 but not published until 1963, and ultimately did not become popular.

The category of humanist sans serif typefaces, which Gill Sans helped to define, saw great attention during the 1980s and 1990s, especially as a reaction against the overwhelming popularity of Helvetica and Univers in the 1960s and 1970s. Modern sans serif designs inspired by Gill often adapt the concept by creating a design better proportioned and spaced for body text, a wider and more homogeneous range of weights, something easier since the arrival of the computer due to the use of multiple master or interpolated font design, or more irregular and hand drawn in style. Jeremy Tankard's Bliss and Volker Küster's Today Sans are modern variations; Tankard commented on the genre's eclipse that his aim was to create "the first commercial typeface with an English feel since Gill Sans". Rowton Sans is inspired by Gill but has a nearly upright italic, similar to that used by Gill in his serif font Joanna. More distantly, Arthur Vanson's Chesham Sans is inspired by the British tradition of sans serif signpainting, with many similarities to Gill's work. Bitstream's Humanist 521 was an unofficial digitisation, to which its Russian licensee ParaType added a Cyrillic version in 1997. The companies SoftMaker and Fontsite also released Gill Sans digitisations under different names including 'Chantilly', 'Gibson' and others. More loosely, Syntax by Hans Eduard Meier is similar in some ways. Released in 1968 and praised by Tschichold, it was intended to be a more dynamic, handwriting influenced sans serif form. Its italic is, however, more of an oblique than Gill's. Many other fonts are influenced by Gill Sans to some extent.