1907 London Underground Tile Font

A free newspaper is easily found somewhere in the corner on London Underground’s platform, so is the painted station name on the wall. We are too used to noticing their existence and forget the history of a tube station’s development.

Before Johnston San, the bespoke typeface for Transport for London’s identity, there are several stations decorated with painted type on the tile wall. The tiles limit with physical grids for the painter, but, therefore, generates a special structure of the type.

I documented the old typefaces on the wall and re-traced them in digital form to preserve the special details of the hand-crafted typefaces. The format of a newspaper is to emphasise the live-size scale of the typeface which is not just for the specimen purpose but to draw attention to the nuanced typographic details to the audience.