Down at The Tube Station at Midnight

Print Magazine online has an article about the expanded font set Johnson Underground, designed by local font gurus P22.

The article speculates about the popularity of Gill Sans over Johnson Underground- a font famous to all London train riders, designed in 1916 for the London Transit Authority by Edward Johnson. This font had a popular rebirth with the digital remix years ago by P22, which was again remixed on it's latest addition (2007) of a super, powerful pro pack. It's like getting all those bonus tracks/beats on your extended music CD.

I have always loved the font, and it's delightful curves- it was like riding on the subway or a mountain pass highway. But it was clearly missing the extended faces, specifically an italic (I always slanted it in Illustrator- yuck) and bold (same deal, adding a stroke to beef it up).... but now we got it all including: thin, medium, heavy, small caps, light, demi and more.

The P22 website states that the Pro font collectively contains over 5000 glyphs! Holy extras, Batman!!

Was the font designer Eric Gill just trying to improved on the original Johnson Underground font with his Gill Sans- a very popular font? Let the type-geek discussion begin at Printmag.com....