Gill Sans is a very common sans-serif typeface created by Eric Gill and published by the Monotype Corporation between 1928 and 1930. Based on Edward Johnston's Johnston typeface for the London Underground, Gill Sans is widely admired for its quiet gracefulness and versatility.

It was notably used by the London and North Eastern Railway and later by British Railways. It has also been extensively used by Penguin Books, and even featured on their first run of paperbacks.

Included with Mac OS X, Gill Sans has found its way into numerous books, advertisements, and signs. In the Bitstream font collection, Gill Sans is called Bitstream Humanist 521.

Since 1997 the BBC has used Gill Sans as the font for the lettering in its logo, and many derivative uses such as the logos of individual services. The Church of England has recently begun to employ Gill Sans as the font for its Common Worship texts and collections.

The Johnston typeface is similar to Gill Sans but is easily distinguishable through the shape of the dots above the lowercase "i"s. In Johnston they are diamond shaped, in Gill Sans they are round.

Gill Sans was part of a competitive period in the 1920s when various foundries were developing modern sans‐serif type faces for various lead type setting technology. Gill Sans was developed by UK Monotype in part as a response to the popularity of Futura.

Other organisations using Gill Sans

• JCB
• Saab Automobile
• Saab Technologies
• Carlton Television
• BBC
• AMD
• Folio Young Enterprise, a publishing company based in Colchester, UK.
• L.J. Hooker
• Network Rail
• QVC
• Royal Society of Arts - which awarded designer Eric Gill the accolade "Royal Designer for Industry"
• The University of Southampton
• The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Commons.
• Benetton Group S.p.A.
• Knudsen & Berg
• Philips
• Slovenia on its future Euro coins (Slovenian Government PR Office)
• Seven Network Australia - on certain news and current affair programming
• Also used on the Beltronics STi Driver Radar detector

External links

• Gill Sans MT font information (Microsoft typography)

Typefaces | Sans-serif typefaces

Gill Sans | Gill Sans | Gill Sans | Gill Sans | Gill Sans