Task 1

Jock Kinneir & Margaret Calvert 

On 1 January 1965 the British road signage system, created by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir, came into law.

Since its launch, 54 years ago, the road signage system has come to be seen as one of the most successful information design projects ever produced in the country.

Before the introduction of Calvert and Kinneir’s signage, road signs in the UK were not very effective and were designed by a number of various companies. 

In 1961, designer Herbert Spencer (Pictured Below)  drove around the roads of Britain photographing the negatives of different sign designs on the network. 

(Herbert Spencer)

(Typographica Magazine)

(Typographica Magazine)

The resulting images were published in magazine called 'Typographica' pictured above. In this magazine, Spencer voiced “an urgent need to review the whole system of British road signs and especially to adopt simple pictorial symbols in place of the old road signs. 

Old British Road Signs

In response to Spencer’s, the government set up the Worboys Committee in July 1963 to review signage on all British roads. The committee appointed Kinneir and Calvert to create a new system.

Since the late 1950s, Calvert and Kinneir were working on signage for the new motorway network that that the Ministry of Transport was creating across the country. They wanted to develop a signage system that would be as easy as possible to understand.

Calvert and Kinneir developed the Motorway and Transport typefaces, based on Aksidenz Grotesk, and placed each letter in the sign in a letter tile to create the right spacing.

They also mixed upper and lower-case letters, in contrast to the previous convention of using block upper-case letters. Calvert has said this is to aid word recognition, which is quicker in mixed-case words than in reading individual capital letters.

Following the success of their motorway signage system, Calvert and Kinneir were appointed to develop a signage system for all British roads.