Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert are responsible for designing the way we find our way around the UK. Together they deigned Britain’s road signage system.
They devised a rigorous signage system of carefully coordinated lettering, colours, shapes and symbols for Britain’s new motorways in the late 1950s and for all other roads in the mid 1960s. Efficient and elegant, their system was one of the most ambitious information design projects ever undertaken in Britain. It is a role model for modern road signage in other countries and is still in use today.
In the process of designing Britain’s road signs, Kinneir and Calvert had to design an entirely new typeface for the system. They designed the typeface ‘Transport’ which was used on all road signs with type. Plus, the image based graphics and the colour coding system was so successful that it is easy related to most things today when communicating in design.