Margaret Calvert at Work! —The Mother of Modern-Day Information Design
When she first drove along a stretch of unopened motorway to see the new signs, Calvert was thrilled. “I remember it was a beautiful autumnal day,” she says, “with an intense blue sky. “There was no traffic, just me and Jock. The banks of the motorway were brown so it looked like an alien landscape. There were some signs, and the scale of them with the white on blue — well, we were on quite a high.” Using the European standard shapes for warnings, Calvert designed the pictorial instructions for road users, referencing what was familiar to her — a cow for livestock crossing, modeled after Patience, her favorite heifer on the family farm; children crossing the road, inspired by her upbringing and including a subtle self-portrait. The road signs were tested in 1958 on the Preston Bypass, now the M6. “In your life, you have a few high points,” says Calvert, recalling the trip she and Kinneir took to see the installed signs. “We climbed into Jock’s Fiat 600 and I remember it being completely surreal. There was nobody on the motorway, and the banks were still terracotta, as the planting hadn’t grown yet. There were just these enormous blue signs. We ended up taking a wrong turning and ended up in a ploughed field.” One of the most ambitious and effective information design projects ever executed in Britain is the road and motorway signage system designed by JOCK KINNEIR (1917–1994) and MARGARET CALVERT (1936-) from 1957 to 1967. Intellectually rigorous yet inclusive and engaging, their system has become a role model for modern road signage all over the world.
Born in 1936, Margaret Calvert spent her earlier years in South Africa. At the age of fourteen, her family moved to England. During the 1950s she attended Chelsea College of Art where she took up a four-year course in illustration. Calvert proved to have exceptional illustrating skills that impressed her teachers, albeit she was not quite fond of the subject. What she aspired to be was a designer but the field of graphic designing was not yet introduced. While learning illustration, she also studied commercial art as part of the course. According to Calvert, they were instructed to simply concentrate on just the idea not to incorporate the typography or lettering while designing a poster. One of her professors Schleger, dissuaded their class from learning typography believing they were too old for the task.
It was while studying illustration at Chelsea College of Art that Calvert first encountered Jock Kinneir as a tutor. “I think Jock recognized that I was serious,” Calvert says. “He approached me and said, ‘I’ve got this job and I need an assistant.’ ‘What does it involve?’ I asked. ‘Design,’ he replied. ‘Like nothing you do here.’” He asked her to work for him, having been appointed to design a signing system for the, then new, Gatwick Airport. While working at Kinneir’s office in Knightsbridge, Calvert became “hooked on lettering”. Through commissions for clients such as P&O and the Milk Marketing Board, she honed her skills. More than half a century ago, Calvert, along with her colleague Jock Kinneir, took on what he called “possibly the biggest graphic design job ever.” In 1957, Kinneir was appointed head of signs for Britain’s roads. He then hired Calvert to redesign the road sign system and she came up with simple, easy-to-understand pictograms.
Working together, they developed a typeface, Transport that displayed both upper and lower-case sans-serif lettering. Notwithstanding the fact that their sign system had full support of the Anderson Committee, Colin Forbes and modernist Herbert Spencer, it was heavily attacked by the traditionalists such as the calligrapher and stone carver David Kindersley, who had his own ideas, especially regarding the design of the lettering. Eventually, the road signs were placed on the Preston Bypass for testing, in 1958. Subsequently, the British government formed the Worboys Committee. Sir Walter Worboys was designated the chairman of the committee who was assigned the task of reviewing the entire network of road signs throughout Britain. Their firm had been renamed as Kinneir Calvert and Associates by the time the review committee produced the report and put it into effect. At the time, neither Calvert nor Kinneir could drive, but she says this never mattered. “You thought of everything from the standpoint of: ‘What if I am at the wheel, doing speeds of over 70mph?’”
The hardest, but most satisfying sign, she says, is the “children crossing”. “The first school sign was a torch, then a boy followed by a girl with a satchel — it looked very grammar school. I wanted it to look more inclusive so you couldn’t tell if it was secondary modern or grammar. And I wanted it to be more caring — so I made the little girl lead the little boy. But it needed to have something urgent about it.” Calvert says that while one-way signs and directions were rendered in arrows, she did not want the pictograms to be abstract. “I wanted them to be more human, figurative. I think they have more personality.” She based the little girl on pictures of herself as a child — although slightly chubbier, and the cow pictogram on an animal called Patience on her cousin’s farm.
In addition to her road signs, she has designed commercial fonts for Monotype, including the eponymous Calvert font, a slab serif design which she created in 1980 for use on the Tyne and Wear Metro system. More recently, the Transport font has been given a new lease of life in digital form. Calvert was working on a slightly modified version of the lettering with Henrik Kubel — who had once been a student of hers at the Royal College of Art — when she was visited by Ben Terrett, head of design for Government Digital Services. Terrett’s team had been developing a project to consolidate more than 400 government websites, and he invited Calvert to comment on a work-in-progress. She recalls: “They were using a number of fonts — Gill, which is the official civil service typeface, and Georgia — but he said they were thinking of using Transport. The road signs worked as a network, and this could be applied to the new website.” When the government’s gov.uk website went live on 1 July 2012, its previously disparate sites were unified by a simple design and two weights of Calvert’s New Transport font. The typeface that was used to link some 390,000km of British roads (and many more abroad) now links the digital presence of the UK government to its citizens.
In Margaret’s studio, on the ground floor of her north London home, is a self-portrait, produced for a Royal Academy exhibition. “I found the sign out on the street,” Calvert says with a smile, “so I nicked it and turned it into me.” The “men at work” road sign has been modified to include Calvert as the character with a shovel, her silhouette revealing a knee-length skirt, a neat bob, and Wellington boots. In this room, the warning is clear: Calvert at work.
