Swing this way! The sign design genius that kept Britain’s drivers (and ducks) safe | design

SMargaret Calvert’s studio, filled with a barrage of road signs, trendy chairs and all the tools of her trade, occupies the ground floor of her ornate home in Islington, London. She still draws by hand with colored pencils, felt-tip pens and gouache, echoes of a simpler time when there were neither computers nor large numbers of Pantone color options. “There was also no such thing as graphic design at that time,” she says. “It was just called commercial art.”

There have only been a few graphic designers who have a typeface named after them. One of the first of these artists was the Italian artist Giambattista Bodoni, who lived in the eighteenth century, and whose lines gave him a kind of immortality. But his efforts were not to everyone’s satisfaction: William Morris is said to have hated Bodoni’s letters, and was deeply incensed by their “incendiary ugliness”.

Like Bodoni, Calvert was inserted into the graphic equivalent of Mount Olympus. The Calvert typeface can be appreciated on the Tyne and Wear Metro, as it excels at defining the route from Gateshead to North Shields and beyond. In fact, the black M on a yellow background, which instantly stands for Metro, has become a civic and graphic landmark across the Northeast. This might have pleased William Morris. There is no “incendiary ugliness” here.

Designed in 1971 for the new French town of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, but rejected as being “too English”, Calvert is a contemporary version of the slave slab. (Serif refers to letters with borders adjacent to their ends – you’re reading one right now.) These bold, attention-grabbing lines date back to the 19th century. Calvert has been described as having “energy and elegance, avoiding rigidity and mechanicalness”. The same can be said about the woman herself.

I have been drawing since a very early age. “I would have been three or four years old,” she recalls. “And I can remember drawing on the floor on huge sheets of paper, not with crayons, just with pencil. It was always a house with a chimney and a family standing in front of it.” I especially enjoyed life drawing. “I think that’s why I’m fascinated by lines and letters, because I think of the shape of a letter as if it were a skeleton embodied in different ways.”

Calvert turns 90 this year, and in an extraordinary design and teaching career that began in the late 1950s and continues, he has become the embodiment of a national treasure. She was even on Top Gear, speeding down the motorway in a white Vauxhall Insignia with James May in 2010, where they discussed the technicalities of road signs, and their pictorial legacy to the nation. Anyone who has driven on a British motorway before will have encountered the signage system I designed with Jock Kinnear as part of the ambitious post-war modernization and expansion of the country’s road network, standardizing and rationalizing what had become a confusing and potentially dangerous array of letter styles, colors and signage layouts.

This project, which lasted from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, was a massive undertaking, but Calvert and Kenner’s clear, legible and very elegant signage earned the status of a design classic. Officially implemented in 1965, and largely unchanged, it was a ‘home style for Britain’, embracing modernity with the aim of making everyday things better for everyone. The roads are safer, and driving is more fun. Design historian Robin Kinross praised the project for highlighting “the role that design can play in public life”.

Calvert created many familiar cautionary illustrations, including silhouettes of a deer and a trotting horse, inspired by the pioneering photography of Edward Muybridge. The farm animals are indicated by a constant cow, based on a real cow called Patience that she encountered while growing up on a relative’s farm in Wiltshire. Calvert herself appears on the sign for the children’s crossing, as a girl with distinctive wavy hair leading a young boy across the road, rather than the other way around. Although she is very humble, she always means business.

Kinnear, who taught graphic design to Calvert at Chelsea College of Art in London and later invited her to join his office, described her as “a student who rigorously gave her best effort at what she was doing. She kept her head down and worked like a madman.”

Appropriately, Women at Work is the title of a great new book in which Calvert tells the intertwined story of her life and career. But it is also a history of post-war graphic design in Britain. The cover is a version of the famous “Men at Work” illustration, playfully modified to include Calvert’s (static) wavy hair and skirt. Visually polished, insightful, and wryly humorous, he’s the perfect Calvert. Given the length and brilliance of her career, it was also long overdue – but she was happy to wait and choose the right moment for her. ““I think the timing is perfect, because I am still involved in interesting design tasks,” she says.

Among other things, an exhibition is expected in Kyoto, following the popular 2020 exhibition at the Design Museum in London. Make Way for Design, a documentary by Argentine director Patricio Orozco, which traces the history of road signs in Britain from surviving Roman monuments to the legacy of Calvert and Kennear, will be screened in the UK in March.

Born near Durban in South Africa, Calvert came to Britain as a teenager, arriving in 1950. While studying at Chelsea, she enjoyed the emerging swinging London, and loved the freedom of art school where “you could spend a whole week painting a still life”.

She seemed destined for a career as a painter or art teacher, but then went to work for Kinnear in his cramped office in Knightsbridge. “One customer described it as a guy, a girl, and a hole in the wall,” Calvert recalls. At first, she did a little bit of everything, “including writing, which I taught myself. And I did it very badly. If there’s something you don’t want to do, do it badly and no one will ask you to do it again.”

By 1964, she was a partner, and was designing all standards from luggage labels, stickers, letters and books, through to signage at Gatwick Airport and British Rail’s identity, all with the same meticulous care to achieve superior clarity and legibility. But she hates the word brand, saying it reminds her of animals.

After Kinnear retired in 1980, she went on to teach and work at the Royal College of Art for nearly 40 years. “Graphic design used to be thought of as a man’s domain,” she says. “So I think it was very surprising that people found me there.” I started teaching typography to industrial design students. “I asked them to redesign the information graphics on the parking meters, which some of them took seriously.”

Although she became Head of the Graphic Design Department, her time at the RCA was marred by upheaval and problems, with the departure of department heads, constant reorganization and changes to the curriculum. But for her students—many of whom are now successful designers and teachers—she was a supportive influence, encouraging critical thinking and exploration of disciplines beyond graphics. One of her former students, Stefan Boffler, a professor of identity design at Augsburg, says she had the ability to “instantly recognize any excess baggage that prevents an idea from taking flight.”

The Carriage font, the lettering created by Calvert and Kinnear for the Road Signs Committee, is perhaps the most common font in Britain. It has since moved into the digital world, where it has been skillfully reimagined by Calvert and Henrik Koppel, another former student. Since 2012, New Transport has been used on gov.uk, the UK government’s website, and its shapes work perfectly within the electronic sphere, a testament to its clarity and enduring aesthetic appeal.

However, as Calvert memorably describes in his book Women at Work, the original conception was never straightforward. The idea of ​​a sans serif typeface (with no final strokes) and the use of lowercase and uppercase letters (“more legible because you read through the shape of the word”) have been challenged by traditionalists.

An arduous trial took place, captured in archive photographs showing men in flat caps sitting solemnly at an airfield as a car passes by with an Oldham and Smithwick road sign strapped to its roof. Ultimately, Calvert and Kinnear – and modernity – prevailed in what they called “the Sheriff’s Battle.” The whole plot has the makings of a deliciously cinematic drama about Britain’s tortuous relationship with progress, perhaps with a young Margaret played by Jessie Buckley.

Aside from the time she used to commute in a white Porsche 356C (“I bought it for the beauty of it, but it kept breaking down. It cost me a fortune to run, but I loved it”), Calvert is famously unflashy. Much like her work, which does not call attention to itself but is the essence of human-centered design, facilitating readability and movement in everything from transportation systems to buildings or websites. “Design for me is a process,” she says. “It’s about making things better. Basically, it’s about head, heart and hand.”