Transportation Graphics: [is concerned with]Where Am I Going? How Do I Get There?...
[And something that might be on the test] “Consistency in design is the visual equivalent of grammar in language.”
It is not common to see a road sign involving cats, but here is one, a charming if solitary example. Do not buy anything at that link. The picture was taken 18 January 2015 at Monk Road, Horfield, Bristol.
Here for those wanting to pursue the topic of Jock Kinneir, are excerpts from his ODNB article.
'Kinneir, (Richard) Jock.... typographer and graphic designer, was born at... Aldershot, Hampshire,... the son of Guy Kinneir (1892-1964), a second lieutenant in the Manchester regiment and later a medical practitioner, and his wife, Helen Elizabeth Margaret, nee Smith (1890/91-1956). The Kinneir family claimed an unbroken line of sons following fathers as medical doctors since the late seventeenth century....but Jock Kinneir pursued a career in the visual arts. His early training was as a student of engraving, illustration, and painting at Chelsea School of Art, London, from 1935 to 1939, where his tutors included Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. During these years he made some early connections with the world of transport for which his later designs were so renowned [,] through commissions to undertake a small number of poster designs for Shell's advertising campaign 'You Can be Sure of Shell'. These included '... 'These Men Use Shell: Riders to Hounds' (c.1938). He married on 2 January 1941 Joan Illingworth Lancaster (1915-2008), daughter of John Lancaster, postmaster; they had a daughter and two sons.
'Immediately following the Second World War, Kinneir worked as an exhibition designer for the Central Office of Information, and in 1950 was invited to work for the Design Research Unit, Britain's first multidisciplinary design agency. He was involved in one of the major projects of the post-war years, the Festival of Britain exhibition (1951), for which he designed the polar display in the Dome of Discovery on the South Bank London site.
'In 1956 Kinneir established his own design practice in Knightsbridge, London, and was invited by Brian Robb, head of illustration at Chelsea School of Art (and also a designer of Shell posters in the 1930s), to take up a part-time lecturing post in graphic design there. In the following year a fortuitous meeting with architect David Allford led to a commission for the signage for the new Gatwick Airport, commissioned from the architectural firm Yorke, Rosenberg, and Mardall, Allford's employer. Realizing the scale and importance of this project Kinneir invited Margaret Calvert (b. 1936), one of his most diligent students at Chelsea School of Art, to assist him. This inaugurated the highly successful and creative working partnership of Kinneir and Margaret Calvert that flourished for over twenty years. It also marked the start of Kinneir's distinguished career in public signage.
'Kinneir and Calvert's highly legible, foot traveller-focused signs for Gatwick Airport attracted the attention of Colin Anderson, chairman of the P&O shipping line, a committed campaigner for better standards of design in the inter-war and post-war years. Anderson commissioned Kinneir to undertake the design of a baggage labelling system for P&O that would simplify baggage handling and improve performance. Following this, Kinneir was appointed as a design consultant to the Anderson committee on Traffic Signs for Motorways, established in 1957. This marked a significant change from earlier government initiatives .... since the committee's membership included considerable design expertise such as that of architect Hugh Casson, designer and writer Noel Carrington, and Sir William Glanville, director of the Road Research Laboratories. Background research included investigation into motorway signs in California and Germany and Kinneir's new signage system was tested on Britain's first motorway standard road, the Preston bypass, in late 1958. The Anderson committee's final recommendations were characterized by white sans serif lettering and diagrams set on a blue background, with a new typeface developed specifically for motorways. Some felt that Kinneir and Calvert's Motorway font was aligned with the spirit of European modernism at a time when sensitivities about Britain's relationship with Europe were strained with the signing of the treaty of Rome (1957) and the inauguration of the European Economic Community (1958). Debate ran in the media with press coverage in The Times and The Guardian, a colloquium on transport signage organized by Design magazine in 1959, and even a television debate hosted by Cliff Michelmore on the BBC current affairs show Tonight between Kinneir and one of his fiercest critics, stonecutter and typographer David Kindersley.
'In 1961 Sir Walter Worboys, former chairman of the Council of Industrial Design, was appointed by the minister of transport to establish a second road signage committee 'to review traffic signs on all-purpose roads, as distinct from motorways, including roads in urban areas, and to recommend what changes should be made'. This resulted in the publication of Traffic Sign Regulations and General Directions, introduced in 1965 with a new font designed by Kinneir and Calvert (Kinneir's company had been renamed Kinneir Calvert Associates in 1964). The new signage system was to be in line with the recommendations of the 1949 UN World Conference on Road and Motor Transport, subsequently adopted by thirty countries, and informed the decision to adopt the continental practice of using pictograms rather than words for warning and information signs. Design magazine remarked in May 1967: 'The directional road signs for Britain's primary and non-primary roads have been evolved by a combination of research, design and committee work that has resulted in a single design solution to a vast and complex problem.' Kinneir and Calvert's success lay in the legibility, titling system, and layout of the two alphabets they devised, Transport Medium for lettering on dark backgrounds and Transport Heavy for lettering on light backgrounds. The Transport font was also the basis for signage for the National Health Service (the Health Alphabet of 1965).
'In 1965 Kinneir and Calvert commenced work on the design of Rail Alphabet, the typeface that replaced Gill Sans in British Rail's crisp new visual identity programme co-ordinated by the Design Research Unit. They also worked on signage for airports in Glasgow, Melbourne, Sydney, and Bahrain, as well as for the Tyne and Wear Metro, completed in 1980.
'During much of this period Kinneir had maintained an interest in higher education, becoming head of graphic design at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1964 to 1974. He also undertook a number of other visual communication projects such as the horizontally striped cover for the 1964 edition of Alex Comfort's Pelican paperback, Sex and Society. In the same year he was one of a number of mainly Scottish designers commissioned by the General Post Office to put forward 'non-traditional design proposals' for the Robert Burns portraiture stamps released in 1966. These were proposed during Labour politician Tony Benn's period of office as postmaster-general. Benn wished to modernize postage stamp design by discontinuing the inclusion of the queen's head. Kinneir's 'non-traditional' stamp designs were originally the preferred choice for the Burns issue, but with the addition of the queen's head. Later the stamp advisory committee chose another design and Kinneir's were never produced.
'Kinneir's book, Words and Buildings: the Art and Practice of Public Lettering, was published in 1980, the year in which he lost sight in his right eye. He retired in 1981, moving from London to Winderton, near Banbury, Oxfordshire, where he had designed a new home.... . Although his is not a household name, Jock Kinneir's design legacy is familiar to the general public through his visual transformation of the design of lettering and signage in public spaces across the face of Britain, including airports, motorways and roads, railways and hospitals.'
The ODNB also mentioned that Jock Kinneir's wealth when he died was £114,484.
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