Interview with Eric Gill
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- armchaircritic
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MyFonts interview will Eric Gill, creator of the Gill Sans and Perpetua Typefaces. Great history of how he got into creating typefaces and some interesting comments about design too.
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Q: In conceiving letterforms, how do you determine what is appropriate? For instance, when you invented an innovative concept such as your own Gill Sans, how did you determine which shapes would work optically?
A: Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to. But this is not to say that because we have got used to something demonstrably less legible than something else would be if we could get used to it, we should make no effort to scrap the existing things. This was done by the Florentines and Romans of the fifteenth century; it simply requires good sense in the originators and good will in the rest of us.
Good will seems to be a common possession of mankind, but good sense, i.e. intelligence, critical ability, and that intense concentration upon perfection which is a kind of genius, is not so common. Everybody thinks that he knows an A when he sees it, but only the few extraordinary rational minds can distinguish between a good one and a bad one, or can demonstrate precisely what constitutes A-ness. When is an A not an A? Or when is an R not an R? It is clear that for any letter there is some sort of norm. To discover this norm is obviously the first thing to be done.
The first notable attempt to work out the norm for plain letters was made by Edward Johnston when he designed the sans-serif letter for the London Underground Railways. Some of these letters are not entirely satisfactory, especially when it is remembered that, for such a purpose, an alphabet should be as near as possible to “fool-proof”, i.e. the forms should be measurable — nothing should be left to the imagination of the sign-writer or the enamel-plate maker. In this quality of “fool-proofness”, my Monotype sans-serif face is perhaps an improvement: the letters are more strictly normal.
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Q: In conceiving letterforms, how do you determine what is appropriate? For instance, when you invented an innovative concept such as your own Gill Sans, how did you determine which shapes would work optically?
A: Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to. But this is not to say that because we have got used to something demonstrably less legible than something else would be if we could get used to it, we should make no effort to scrap the existing things. This was done by the Florentines and Romans of the fifteenth century; it simply requires good sense in the originators and good will in the rest of us.
Good will seems to be a common possession of mankind, but good sense, i.e. intelligence, critical ability, and that intense concentration upon perfection which is a kind of genius, is not so common. Everybody thinks that he knows an A when he sees it, but only the few extraordinary rational minds can distinguish between a good one and a bad one, or can demonstrate precisely what constitutes A-ness. When is an A not an A? Or when is an R not an R? It is clear that for any letter there is some sort of norm. To discover this norm is obviously the first thing to be done.
The first notable attempt to work out the norm for plain letters was made by Edward Johnston when he designed the sans-serif letter for the London Underground Railways. Some of these letters are not entirely satisfactory, especially when it is remembered that, for such a purpose, an alphabet should be as near as possible to “fool-proof”, i.e. the forms should be measurable — nothing should be left to the imagination of the sign-writer or the enamel-plate maker. In this quality of “fool-proofness”, my Monotype sans-serif face is perhaps an improvement: the letters are more strictly normal.
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- groups:
- Design, Graphic Design, Typography
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- tags:
- Design, Graphic Design, Typography, Type
