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Word reaches me from P22, the type foundry, that the gorgeous London Underground font set has been expanded and is for sale.
Underground Pro is the most expansive P22 font system ever. It includes 6 weights with unprecedented language support for Latin (extended Latin, plus IPA, Vietnamese, symbols and stylistic variants), Greek (monotonic & polytonic) and Cyrillic (extended including Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc.) languages.
Cumulatively, there are over 5,000 glyphs in each of the weights (Pro only).
Other features include Small Caps and Petite Caps for all weights, titling options that mimic London Transport signage and the addition of lower case characters to the bold weight.
Underground Pro is also packaged with fonts in basic OpenType format for applications (such as Microsoft Word) that do not support Pro OpenType features.
The overall design of Underground Pro, like the P22 London Underground Set (1997), is kept as intended by Edward Johnston and builds upon the proportion system adhered to by Johnston in designing the London Underground face.
Although the regular and bold weights have been subtly redrawn for Underground Pro, the characteristics of the 1916 design remain intact. The possibilities of OpenType have also afforded a great opportunity to expand on this classic type design. The Pro version includes alternate caps from Johnston’s lettering for Dryad, “humanistic” and “geometric” alternates and a stylistic set that replaces all the diamond-shaped punctuation and diacritic marks with circular ones.
The font was designed by Paul Hunt who adds:
“Ultimately, I wanted to make a typeface system which was thoroughly customizable so that the user could change its appearance to suit their particular needs.”
Both Underground Pro and the The London Underground Set are licensed exclusively to P22 from the London Transport Museum.
Currently listening to St. Germain - Tourist - Land of…
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree mate, this font is really smart, although I’m not sure which is more amusing, me thinking a font is really smart, beautiful in fact, or you being up at 4.52am and blogging about it!
LOL! Academic pressures bring out the sleep-blogger in me
Looks quite a bit like Gil Sans
Ahh, but Josh both are gorgeous fonts, but the London Underground font is totally distinctive when seen ‘in the wild’ as it were on actual signs, etc., on the Underground. It is a beautiful font — I’m hoping that it doesn’t get abused by designers and thus lose its potency
More on this topic, Lee. As has been pointed out to me, such specialist fonts are great for one-off use, maybe in printed docs or static pdfs or designs.
But the problem with them is that because so few use them or have them installed on their computer, you’re really limited as to where they’re displayed properly (on screen etc). I guess this will limit the chances of it being abused!
Be interested to hear any thoughts on this issue.
Lee - I absolutely love this font. Was always a big fan of it when I lived in London and I admired the way London Underground’s graphic design and visual identity were able glamorise what is actually a filthy, crowded, overpriced (but highly effective) mode of public transport. Font nerds amongst us will stroke our chins and nod approvingly at the dot of the ‘i’ which is a diamond. Nice.
Alex - I think most specialist typefaces like this are designed to be used by professional graphic designers for print or for electronic applications where the type is saved as an image. For example, at Santos, Gill Sans and Officiana Sans are the two corporate fonts but we don’t make them available on our employees’ PCs. We just ask them to use Arial for everything.