ITC Johnston has all the best typographic qualities of a geometric sans serif married to humanist letter shapes and proportions. It is sturdy, straight forward, and sociable. It has also been formally tested in Canada for those with impaired vision, and came out on top–ahead of Franklin Gothic, Univers and Gill Sans. It’s a design that would seem to have it all–except an italic design. When we first released ITC Johnston in 1999, it was, unfortunately, without a suite of italic faces. The reason? ITC Johnston finds it roots in Edward Johnston’s early 1900 “London Underground Railway” typeface and there were no italics for his original design.
Now the family is complete. David Farey and Richard Dawson worked for over a year to develop a suite of designs italic that would serve as a proper complement to the roman weights. In the process, the original roman designs were also freshened-up. The result is a distinctive, exceptionally versatile and ultimately handsome typeface family.
Johnston’s London Underground Railway typeface was the first alphabet created for a specific corporate identity and the first sans serif design of the twentieth century. Erbar, Kabel, Futura and Gill all follow Johnston’s type. Johnston himself, however, never called his design a typeface. It was an alphabet primarily for signage and other display purposes–designed to legible at a glance rather than readable in passages of text.
Farey and Dawson’s adaptation retains the sparkling starkness of Johnston’s letters while allowing it to settle in comfortably at text sizes. Farey recalls that the process was both challenging and enjoyable. “As we were designing the family for both text application and display setting, the monolineal construction of curved letters required visual compensation, but the fun was how far we could go in assessing the balance of a curve on a horizontal plane compared to the curve on a vertical plane.”
ITC Johnston is the culmination of the design abilities of three remarkable designers: Johnston, Farey and Dawson. Or as Dave Farey puts it, “Without Johnston’s dedication to letterforms and in particular his genesis of the 20th century sans serif, we would not have been able to create our interpretation.”