“Our brief to Monotype was to go back to the original principles of Johnston, to reflect on the way the font is now, and see what we might have lost in its 100-year journey,” said TfL Head of Design Jon Hunter.

“We didn’t want to redesign it, but we did know that certain things, for various reasons, had changed,” he added. “Some of the lower case letters, for example had lost their uniqueness.”

The new Johnston100 family includes five weights of the design, including two brand new weights: Hairline and Thin. These two additions demonstrate the challenge of trying to strip a typeface of its mass and find its skeleton – both a design and research task. The result, especially the Hairline, is contemporary in flavor without undermining the characteristics that make it recognizable.