Meeting Johnston altered the course of Gill’s life Johnston’s insights gave his work a direction and a purpose. Having moved to London at 18, he soon came to reject his earlier student work after joining the writing and lettering class given at the Central School of Arts and Crafts by Edward Johnston. If you’re keen on engines, you collect engine names (at our school it was as popular a hobby as “stamps”) and if you draw engines you cannot leave out their names.’ Some years later, as a student at Chichester Technical and Art School, Gill became quite proficient in the art of lettering in the decorative style of the moment: Art Nouveau.
As Gill wrote, ‘locomotives have names, and these are painted on them with great care and artistry. Gill’s love of lettering can be traced back to his schoolboy days, when he loved making drawings of railroads – of locomotives, signals and bridges – which naturally lead to (crudely) drawing type. It would not have coming into being without the impulses from two men that played such essential roles in Gill’s life and career: Edward Johnston and Stanley Morrison. Gill Sans is more than just a typeface: it is a meeting of cultures, a amalgam of influences as far apart as Roman stonecarving and English signpainting, renaissance calligraphy and Arts & Crafts book design. As this book evidences, Gill Sans especially has become an ubiquitous design tool of the digital age. Yet his typefaces – modern classics like Joanna, Perpetua, and Gill Sans – are the one aspect of his heritage that is still relevant in today’s visual culture. He was, of course, many more things as well: a book designer and book illustrator an artist who made elegant woodcuts and sensual drawings a sharp and witty writer.
In his autobiography he wrote that in the field of drawing letters, he would never ‘be anything but an amateur.’ On his gravestone, which he devised himself, Gill described himself as a ‘stone carver’. Eric Gill (1882–1940) did not think of himself primarily as a type designer.
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