Margaret Calvert: Woman at Work

Interesting exhibition at the Design Museum on Margaret Calvert who designed fonts for the motorways and railways.

So much of this show was so familiar and yet I had never thought before how the standard look and signage for roads and transport systems came about. Her first major project was signs for the M1 which were then used on other motorways and roads and became standard. She realised they had to be read at speed from a distance and that therefore people were recognising the shape of the word rather than the letters. Alongside the signposting she also design the standard road signs such as “Men at Work” and “Children Crossing”. Iconic images in the world.

The show explained fonts very well and I confess I had never understood the difference between sans-serif, slab-serif and serif before.

In the 1960s, when the railways were remodelled, she worked on a font for them this time devised to be read by slow moving pedestrians, which was used until privatisation. However she has now developed a new version of it as Network Rail is reassessing its image.

There was also a selection of her “play” images which she does as art projects subverting transport signage such as a Women at Work sign from 2018.

Closes 5 September 2021