Studio Practice: Studio Brief 2 - The Land Travelling Exhibition

Fat Faces All Around:
Lettering and the Festival Style
Paul Rennie

The buildings featured a range of typefaces which became a distinctive characteristic of the festival. Gill Sans was used everywhere and Johnston was a permanent feature in the London Underground. This may have led to the reactionist use of more stylised typefaces for the Festival of Britain. A sample book was published by the panel which mainly used Egyptian and Roman types. The Egyptian features had exaggerated vertical strokes leading it to being referred to as fat face and being used as a display type. Some type bodies were either blocked or shaded to create a three dimensionality to the type. Egyptians had a larger print surface rather than larger letters which was economic and impactful. These letters also manipulated the space they were set on creating negative space with 'meaning, symbolic form and abstraction at the same time'. Sans serif Gill was was also used but had a uneven form making it imperfect. On the architecture letters were made from new types of materials which had not been seen in this context such as perspex, teak etc. Phillip Boydell created Festival Titling especially for the event . Through the use of shaded type it created a sense of three dimensionality which combined a feeling of cut roman type with sans serif typefaces, whilst also simulating bunting. Gordon Cullen illustrated the guide to the exhibition and created the route maps which were created using his serial vision technique, which involved creating a series of images of an area along a plain. The Festival typeface was used across a range of printed material and souvenirs and emblem by Abram Games. The festival was seen as the last major collaboration between the arts disciplines.

Festival Typography and Pleasure

Minimal guidelines given to designers, architects and typographers
Wanted the festival typography to be distinctive from the sans serif forms used in the 1930s and WWII
needed to be coherent without being uniform
There would be a tie instead to the English historical references
18th Century Display types rediscovered - Fat - Slab and wedge serifs
associated with market day and seaside holidays
Mainly Egyptian and Roman letters with shadows,blocks and outline variants
Sans Serif Forms only allowed in the eccentric 19th Century Forms
Nikolaus Pevsner chose Gordon Cullen as head of the Typographic Panel. Both worked together at the Architectural Review where they tried to resolve the problems associated with the functional uniformity of Modernist systems.
Cullen was able to visualise Pevsner's concept for the project through the use of an architectural draftsmanship called 'serial vision'
Cullen described these experiential narratives by reference to the idea of 'townscapes'.
The typography used was particularly suited to the constraints of local printers.
The festival aimed to rekindle the English association with pleasure and entertainment through the use of typography.