OVER the past century, one typeface has come to dominate the visual vernacular of London. Johnston, designed by the British-Uruguayan calligrapher and designer Edward Johnston, was unleashed into the labyrinthine underground network in 1916 and has, with a few moderations, remained intact. This authoritative sans serif with quirky, diamond-shaped tittles (the little dots over lowercase i’s and j’s), appears in the ubiquitous blue, red and white station-sign roundels, and in all the other underground signage and advertising across the city. Johnston’s longevity is in part due to the fact that it was so ahead of its time when it was created. In 1913, when it was commissioned, the London Underground was the greatest network of its kind in the greatest city in the world, and Mr Johnston was determined to break new ground with his typeface. At a time when curling, art nouveau curlicues were the norm, he went in the opposite direction, reducing letters to their most minimal legible form. (This was rather too much for some contemporaries. One wrote that “his block letters…disfigure our modern life.”) Mr Johnston’s instincts have been vindicated and Transport for London (TfL) is especially proud of its signature font. When Nadine Chahine, type director of Monotype, was asked by TfL to refurbish Johnston for its 100th birthday this year, the company likened the brief to retouching the Mona Lisa.

Although London’s symbiosis with Johnston is the oldest, relationships between cities and typefaces are not unique. The affair between New York and Helvetica began with an unsolicited proposal. In 1957 New York’s subway contained a haphazard mishmash of fonts, both serif and sans, and a typographic designer, sick of the visual cacophony, submitted a brief to the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) with a standardised plan, entitled “Out of the Labyrinth”, to help guide locals and tourists alike. It was not Helvetica that he favoured though, but another slab-like design, Futura Demibold. In fact, Helvetica only became the official NYCTA typeface in 1989.

New York was not alone in its slow move towards textual uniformity. Paris’s metro, which many people might associate with the bronze green Art Nouveau lettering found above the entrances of many older stations, had no unified signage until 1971, when the city adopted Métro, a sans serif based on the Univers typeface.

Today, when so many cities rely on tourism for revenue and are sensitive to the power of global branding, those that haven’t developed strong ties with any one font in particular are rushing to commit. A well-designed typeface can act like a friendly local accent, something that has a strong sense of place and reflects a city’s perception of itself. Stockholm’s city council commissioned a neutral and slightly dull sans in 2014, but others, particularly cities that find themselves in need of a rebrand, have been bolder.

The marketing department of Eindhoven, a Dutch city that was blighted by unemployment in the late 1990s but has subsequently become a technology and design hub, open-sourced a new visual identity and typeface in 2013. The result, simply called Eindhoven, has rough, unfinished corners that both hark back to the city’s industrial past and reflect its wish for a creative, energetic future. In 2012, two Chattanooga-based typeface designers set up an emotive Kickstarter campaign to allow them to produce a typeface that could encapsulate their city’s personality. Chatype, the finished product the pair created with the $11,476 they raised, drew on the area’s Cherokee heritage, its industrial history and its ambitions to become a second Silicon Valley. The slightly plump slab serif has now been legally adopted by the municipality.

City typefaces have to be hard workers. Not only must they communicate a sense of place but if, like Johnston, they are used in the transport system, they need to be able to get people places too. It was this that prompted Johnston’s centenary remastering. The city’s ageing population required increased legibility, so letters became a little wider and the x-height (the basic height of a typeface without the ascenders and descenders) was increased by just under 8% to make it clearer. This also brought it closer to the original design created by Mr Johnston (the typeface’s last major refurbishment came in the 1980s, when the trend was for slightly smaller fonts). It was also missing some characters crucial for the new digital age: an @ and # have been added. It was stressed to Monotype, though, that TfL wanted Johnston to get back some of the charm and humanity it had lost. The lowercase ‘g’ in Johnston100 for example, resembles Mr Johnston’s unusual original, with a teardrop-shaped hole in the descender. The changes though, are subtle, and when Johnston100 is rolled out from July it will take sharp eyes to spot the difference. It’s as if, says Ms Chohine of Monotype, a friend began wearing a suit with a slightly more contemporary cut.