Eric Gill: Cut in Stone

Nigel Holmes Eric Gill, Cut in Stone, from Visual Communication Quarterly, Vol 15, No.1-2, 2008 Let’s get this over right away: Eric Gill was a weird guy who wore strange, monastic smocks, and did sexually perverted things. The smocks came in summer and winter weights, and he added red silk underpants on special occasions. Gill meticulously documented all his work and other activities in diaries that are kept at the Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. They are boldly excerpted in Fiona MacCarthy’s 1989 biography, Eric Gill. Indeed, it was this biography that brought the controversial parts of his life to light. Previous writers (all of whom knew about the diaries) chose to ignore them. And as fascinating as these adventures were (especially in light of Gill’s ability to bend his traditional catholic beliefs to allow such things) I’m going to do what most writers have done: concentrate on his art. There’s plenty of that to write about, after all, for Gill was a great artist. He worked in three areas: stone letter-cutting (which led to typography), sculpture, and wood engraving, and he excelled at all three. Of these, his first love was lettering and letter-cutting in stone. Indeed, his gravestone, designed by himself before his death in 1940 and cut (carved) by his longtime assistant Laurie Cribb reads: PRAY FOR ME ERIC GILL STONE CARVER 1882–1940 On the death of his long-suffering wife Mary, in 1961, her name was added to the stone, and it can be seen in the Baptist churchyard at Speen, near High Wycombe, about 25 miles northwest of London. Gill’s output included 750 pieces of inscriptional lettering, more than 100 carved stone figures, roughly 1,000 engravings, and eleven typefaces. These three different areas of work ran concurrently throughout his life, and he considered them equal in importance, but in discussions about fine art, Gill is thought of primarily as a sculptor, with those in the know citing his Stages of the Cross in the catholic Westminster Cathedral in London, and the massive relief he did for the League of Nations building in Geneva; lovers of wood engraving know him as the engraver of beautifully simple, erotic prints, and exquisite book decorations; typophiles think of him as a font designer—all three groups holding their opinions while often ignoring his other achievements. Of the eleven fonts Gill designed (Perpetua, 1925-9; Gill Sans, 1928-30; Perpetua Greek, 1929; Golden Cockerel, 1928-9; Solus, 1929; Felicity, 1930; Joanna, 1930; Aries, 1932; Bunyan, 1934; Jubilee, 1934; Floriated Initials, 1937), Gill Sans is the most well-known, and it’s the typeface you are reading now. Gill Sans has long been my favorite typeface. In 2006, I was asked to design The Enlightened Bracketologist, a book that uses the analogy of a sports “bracket” to show the progression of a competition through several play-offs to a winner. The book’s compilers chose 100 different categories, from animation characters and ad slogans, through candy bars and cheese, to white wines and women’s undies. Each bracket starts with 32 “competitors” and they play against each other in pairs, leaving 16 to go forward to the next round, then eight, and so on until an overall winner emerges. Each bracket each had a different author—an expert in the particular field. I decided to set the whole book in Gill Sans, and somewhere along the making and editing of the book, the authors asked me to contribute a bracket about typefaces. The text I was dealing with indicated that some of the experts contributing brackets admitted that they had a winner in mind before they started—in other words, they were working back from a winner to 32 initial contenders for the title. This was my case, too—how could I pick anything else?—but it was good exercise to try to resolve why I had long favored Gill over the multitude of other faces available: a list that estimates put somewhere between 30,000 and 90,000. The answer to why I loved Gill Sans was pretty easy. (And, by the way, if you think it odd to love a typeface, you haven’t moved in typographic circles, attended all-type-all-the-time conferences, or pored over font books for hours, just for the pleasure of looking at different ways to design a set of 26 letters.) Perhaps in the end, it was Gill himself who supplied the reason for my love of his font: he said that he wanted to create “absolutely legible-to-the-last-degree letters, provide beauty of form to all printed communication, and to maintain the dignity of hand drawn letterforms.” I have always worked in the branch of graphic design known as information graphics. It’s more of a twig than a branch really, because it’s a small field and few people seem to want to work in it, (or even think of it as a field.) An information graphic is not as glamorous as a poster, or an illustration, or even a font design. Those areas of graphic design have clearly recognized stars. Art students see the stars and aspire to their celebrity. Information graphics sit somewhat uncomfortably between the art side of a project and the editorial side. It’s a classic case of “words people” versus “visual people,” except that information graphics necessarily combine elements of the two sides, involving decisions by editors and art directors, who historically don’t see eye to eye. It is often difficult to work in the tight space between two opposing views. If the point of an information graphic is to explain something to a reader, then a direct approach is the most efficient way to do it. And a direct approach is best served by simple drawings and a legible, plain typeface. Legibility and plainness were what Gill tried to achieve in all the faces he designed. When Stanley Morison, the printing scholar and typography reformer at the Lanston Monotype Corporation commissioned Gill to design a new serif face—which was to become Perpetua—the brief stated that it should be a “Roman letter suitable for book reading, which while being new, was to be of general utility and in no respect unusual.” Morison chose Gill over other designers because of his experience carving letters with serifs in stone. As inspiration for his own letter carvings, Gill had, in 1906, taken photographs of the lettering on the Trajan Column and later inscriptions in Rome. Gill wrote: “The Roman alphabet of the Trajan inscription is seen to be an essential alphabet and not a matter of conscious design. What appears at first sight to be the most studied perfection is no more and no less than the fine result of a tradition among craftsmen who were free of conscious artistry.” The work was in his opinion entirely utilitarian, at the service of the text, not of Art, nor, God forbid, of decoration. It was an early call confirming “form follows function,” the architect Louis Sullivan’s famous phrase from around 1910. While Gill was inspired by the Trajan capital letters, he did not slavishly copy nor revive them in the way that designers today often look back at older styles of lettering or other design and reintroduce them as “retro.” (Not that many non-designers recognize these historical antecedents.) In a 1934 letter Gill writes that “we have to take lettering of our own time and, if necessary, improve it by rationality and good workmanship. My inscriptions are no more like the Trajan letters than Caslon’s type is.” (William Caslon, the first British type designer of note, produced his famous font in 1725.) Gill’s Perpetua was followed by another commission from Morison, this time to design a sans serif face. Morison had seen Edward Johnston’s 1916 sans serif font, which he designed exclusively for the London Underground system. Gill had been one of Johnston’s first lettering students, in 1901, and the two remained lifelong friends. Johnston’s Underground font inspired the German Paul Renner to design his own modernist sans, Futura, a face that could be drawn by signwriters with a ruler and compass. Then in 1926, a year before the release of Futura, Gill designed and painted the lettering for Douglas Cleverdon’s bookshop in Bristol, and it was this that led Morison to ask Gill to design a whole typeface, based on the Cleverdon letters. The resulting font was issued in 1928, and was named after himself, because although he had started designing Perpetua before the sans, Perpetua was not quite ready for release. Gill Sans was first used as a display face for the station names and timetables of a branch of British Rail. Unlike Futura and the Cleverdon fascia board, Gill Sans was not a block alphabet, that is, one with strokes of uniform thickness. (It was this uniformity that made it easy to draw.) Visible in the lower-case letters of Gill’s font is a subtle swelling and thinning of line weights, and it is this modeling of the characters, rather than a strict adherence to modernist, industrial principles (which mandated machine-like forms) that gives Gill Sans its readable and human appearance. It has a respectful nod to the classical forms that Gill saw and photographed on the Trajan Column in Rome. When Gill Sans first appeared, there were disapproving comments about “typographical bolshevism,” and Frank Pierpoint, the influential works manager at the Monotype Corporation—the company that commissioned the font—said there is “nothing in this design to recommend it, and much that is objectionable.” But the general public had no such problems, and it was quickly taken up by commercial printers. The font was not available in the U.S. until after WWII. For the 1947-49 redesign of Penguin Books, Jan Tschichold specified Gill Sans for book titles. (Penguin had started using the font from the company’s start in 1935, but type styles had drifted all over the place under various art directors.) In the 1990s, it was used by the BBC as their house font; some even called Gill Sans Britain’s house style. Eric Gill was among the first to be awarded the distinction of Royal Designer for Industry, in 1938. In 2004, the British Post Office (Royal Mail) issued a stamp to honor the font, and it was the official font of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. One tiny alteration to Gill’s original design has improved it. Gill made no difference between the figure one (I), the uppercase i (I) and the lowercase L (I); all three characters look the same. A new font, Gill Sans Alt Fig 1, corrects this by adding a little hook (a serif, really!) to the figure 1. (However, the word Illiteracy still looks a bit odd.) These are small problems. Gill Sans does have detractors. Some objections are unfairly aimed at the man, not his font. For a recent book about problems within the BBC in the 1990s, the author insisted that Gill Sans not be used anywhere in the design of the book, including the cover. The stated reason was the author’s revulsion at Gill’s attitude towards women. (The argument was lost; the font is proudly there on the cover.) Others just think the face looks old and should be retired. At the end of a recent essay in the New York Times about Clearview, a new font that will eventually replace the 50-year-old Highway Gothic on all roadsigns in the U.S., Joshua Yaffa relates a story about the newly redesigned AT&T brand image. He quotes Wendy Clark, a senior VP in charge of advertising at AT&T, saying that the company wanted to project “a more welcoming and transparent image.” (There’s some choice ad-speak for you!) Jaffa continues: “For more than a decade, the company had been using Gill Sans, a leaden, staid typeface from the 20s. Market research showed that many customers identified the old AT&T with attributes like ‘monolithic’ and ‘bureacratic’—an image problem it hoped to fix, in part, with a new typeface.” Well, it’s great that a company should have such faith in a typeface. But it’s odd that they should attach such attributes as monolithic and bureaucratic to Gill’s face. If only today’s corporations had the same absolutely-the-opposite-of-bureaucratic mind as the brilliant Eric Gill. Gill’s font is perfect for information graphics. It manages to be both plain yet still full of character. It reads well in the tiny sizes that are often needed in charts. It gets the job done clearly, with a pleasantly stylish tinge. The reflection of classical forms reminds me of the history of lettering, and it’s good to be reminded of that, to keep a memory of what history can teach us—something that many teachers and students seem to be ignoring today. Gill Sans would not have existed were it not for Eric Gill’s interest in older forms of lettering, together with his changing attitudes to the work of the hand versus the work of the machine. Always one to fight for the product of the human hand over what he saw as the encroaching mass-mechanization of the world, he eventually came to realize that if he could not stop “progress” in the field of printing, then he would try to design beautiful faces for it. The resulting combination of humanity and machine precision is terrific. I wonder what Eric Gill would have thought of the font choices available to us now. Do we need so many typefaces? We don’t. The proliferation just adds to our collective ADD. What ought to matter is what an arrangement of letters says, not what it looks like, right? So, pick a few faces and stick with them. I’ll settle for one.