Gill Sans Fonts

The Gill Sans font family has a friendly warmth and is classified as a humanist sans serif. Gill Sans was originally created in 1926 by type designer Eric Gill and later released by Monotype Corporation in 1928. The popularity of the Gill Sans font can be seen by the use in railways, BBC, Penguin Books, advertisements, signs and Gill Sans is distributed as a system font in Mac OS X and is bundled with certain versions of Microsoft products.

Gill Sans Fonts

Gill Sans Fonts Packages

Gill Sans Family
Gill Sans Condensed Family
Gill Sans Alt One Family
Gill Sans Schoolbook Family
Gill Sans Shadow Family
Gill Floriated Capitals

Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill who was a letter carver, wood engraver, and sculptor.  Eric Gill was born in Brighton, England in 1882 and the second son of a Congregationalist minister. On leaving school he was apprenticed to the architect of the Ecclesiastical Commission of London. Here he developed a fascination in carving lettering and attended evening classes run by the brilliant calligrapher, Edward Johnston.

In 1926, Gill was asked to paint a shop sign for a Bristol bookseller, Douglas Cleverdon. It was this lettering that led Eric Gill to create a sans serif to compete with the continental geometric sans serifs that were beginning to become popular at that time. The typeface that Gill had created for the shop was only a capital alphabet and he embarked on the design aware of greater difficulties of designing an even monocline lowercase alphabet, which entailed many curves and junctions.

Eric Gill’s resulting sans serifs were firmly based on classic roman proportions. Gill was able to introduce refinements, which, with the help of the Monotype drawing office in 1928, released the Gill Sans font which has established Gill Sans as a much loved classic among sans serif typefaces.

The Gill Sans font family was originally produced as hot metal letterpress type, so when it was digitized it is most likely that the original Monotype office drawings were used. The Gill Sans font family now has an extensive range of weights, from light through to ultra bold with italics, and (if required) Old-style figures. In addition there are two display weights , bold and extra bold, four weights of condensed, and two decorative fonts: Gill Sans Light Shadowed , and a titling Gill Sans Shadowed.

The Gill Sans font became popularized when in 1929 when Cecil Dandridge commissioned Eric Gill to produce the Gill Sans font to be used on the London and North Eastern Railway for a unique typeface for all the LNER's posters, advertising and publicity material. The Gill Sans font became the standard typeface for the LNER railway system, soon appearing on every facet of the company's identity, from train nameplates and station signage to restaurant car menus, printed timetables and advertising posters.

In 1948, British Railways began using Gill Sans after nationalization, until the comprehensive British Rail corporate rebranding in 1965 which used the specially designed Rail Alphabet. Other users include Penguin Books' iconic paperback jacket designs from 1935, BBC, and Monotype. The Gill Sans font is distributed as a system font in Mac OS X and is bundled with certain versions of Microsoft products. Gill Sans became Monotype's fifth best selling typeface of the twentieth century.