PNGCars

You probably don’t know who Jock Kinneir or Margaret Calvert is, but you have in one way or another seen their work, followed their instructions, and stayed safe because of them.

 

In fact, their work can be found in over 25 countries in the world and has been described as the first real incidence of creating a global design standard, adopted by so many states.

If you drive down, past Ela Beach up towards town, you will see a crossing to the TAFE school, with a yellow sign of an lady leading by hand a child. This is a world recognized street crossing sign. This image is based on an old photo of Margaret Calvert. If you go to the our airport, you will see the big road signs and arrows based on the Transport Font that she and Jock designed. 

 

The amazing thing is that these signs can be read at speed, at night with only headlights and can be read at great distances.

 

During the 1950’s, car use in England exploded as vehicles such as the mini-cooper became more affordable and large motorways were built.

 

Already the road signages systems in England were quite chaotic and dangerous at times, put up by road engineers only as an after thought.

 

They all had different signs, symbols, typefaces, colors, sizes - a totally haphazard state of road signage that did more bad than good.

 

English graphic designers pointed this out to society in numerous photographic essays.

So in 1957 to 1967, the British Government launched one of the truly great information design projects ever executed in Britian and indeed in the world.

 

The goal was to redesign all the road signages of Britian and create a modern all inclusive, coherent and legible signage system easily adopted by the British public.

 

This was an ambitious program meant to transform and standardize all signs all over all of Brit roads.

The early development of this system was entrusted to graphic designer Jock Kinneir. He was quite an intellectual and brilliant designer, who had his own graphics firm and was also a lecturer at the Chelsea School of Art.

 

He approached one his students, 21 year old Margerat Calvert to be his assistant.

 

Despite the immensity of the task and that the fact that what they were doing was the application of design in a totally new field of super fast cars on very big and busy roads, Kinneir and Calvert took on the task methodolicaly and with clear insight into what they were seeking to achieve.

 

Kinner said he began with a question: “What do I want to know, trying to read a sign at speed?”

Calvert when explaining on the process of their work said “Style never came into it. You were driving towards the absolute essence. How could we reduce the appearance to make the maximum sense and minimum cost?”

 

This next passage from Greyscale Design on their work is the best explanation of the process that led to their development of typeface, style, color and more in the project.

 

“ Their system was rooted in the concept of each sign taking the form of a map oriented towards the driver. Concluding that a combination of upper and lower case letters would be more legible than conventional upper case lettering, they developed a new typeface, a refinement of Aksidenz Grotesk, for use in the signs. Later named Transport, it is recognisably modern as a sans serif font, but it is softer and curvier than the blunt modernist lettering used on continental European road signs. Kinneir and Calvert felt that these qualities would make it seem friendlier and more appealing to British drivers.

 

Each letter within a sign was placed on a letter tile to determine the correct spacing - based on the width of the horizontal strokes in the Transport version of the capital letter in between it and other letters. By treating each letter as a separate unit, the overall size of a sign was determined by the amount of information conveyed. The width of the capital I stroke was also used to specify the size of borders and the spaces between lines of text.”

 

Adopting the same rigorous approach to the organisation of information for road signs as for motorways, they compiled codes of carefully chosen shapes and colours. The codes conformed to the European protocol of using triangular signs to warn drivers, circles to issue commands, and rectangles to relay information. Just as their motorway signs consisted of white lettering against a blue background, they used white lettering for place names and yellow for road numbers against a green background on signage for primary roads, and black lettering against a white background for secondary routes.

 

They decided to adopt the continental style of using pictograms rather than words on the road signs, and Calvert drew most of the pictograms in the friendly, curvaceous style of Transport. Many of her illustrations were inspired by aspects of her own life. The cow featured in the triangular sign warning drivers to watch out for farm animals on the road was based on Patience, a cow on her relatives Warwickshire farm. Eager to make the school children crossing sign more accessible, she replaced the image of a boy in a school cap leading a little girl, with one of a girl and modelled on a photograph of herself as a child with a younger boy. Calvert described the old sign as being: quite archaic, almost like an illustration from Enid Blyton. I wanted to make it more inclusive because comprehensives were starting up.”

 

To this day, their road signage system is still in use and has been fully or partially adopted by all Commonwealth Countries, by other free States such as United States, by Arab Nations, by China and socialist, communist States. 

 

You can see their work all over many of our roads, especially in Port Moresby.

It is an amazing but true story of a revolution that has spread by itself across the globe, and one that we take for granted.

 

Kinneir has passed away and Calvert is a much older designer these days, revered in design circles for the brilliant work she did when she was young and her illustrious career.

 

Their legacy will always remain, in countries like Papua New Guinea, Australia, England, USA, Saudia Arabia and more.

 

So next time you drive past the Ela Beach crossing, hit your horn for the yellow sign of the girl leading the small child by the hand.