© Margaret Calvert
It is almost impossible to travel anywhere in the UK and not benefit from Margaret Calvert’s skill as a designer. From the signs of Britain’s national road network to railway stations and the NHS, Margaret’s ultra-legible typeface and engaging pictograms have become an integral part of everyday British life.
Her remarkable career spans not just graphic design but education too: Margaret became an influential educator at the Royal College of Art, where she taught a generation of designers, many of whom have achieved global recognition, such as Quentin Blake and Marion Deuchars.
Margaret Calvert: Woman at Work is the first book dedicated to Margaret, a pioneer of design for public service. Capturing the full arc of her career, Woman at Work offers a unique insight into her early years in South Africa and her formative experiences after moving to the UK as a teenager, before exploring the three distinct phases of her professional life.
In this extract, Margaret sheds light on how she and long-time collaborator Jock Kinneir set about creating a typeface suitable for use on motorway signage across the nation. The project came about after Kinneir helped to design signage for Gatwick Airport. He invited Calvert to join him as an assistant, and the pair went on to collaborate on numerous design projects, many which can still be seen across the country today.
Above, left: Margaret Calvert in her studio, February 2026. Above, right: © Margaret Calvert. British Rail sign at Paddington Station in London. Late 1960s.
With British drivers taking to the roads in unprecedented numbers in the 1950s, the existing road signs proved to be totally inadequate for traffic travelling at speed. And it wasn’t long before the nation was following Germany, with the construction of motorways. Because of Jock’s work on Gatwick Airport, he was appointed by the Anderson Committee, headed by Colin Anderson, the chairman of P&O, to design the motorway signs. This was followed by a commission from the Worboys Committee to design a system for the all-purpose roads, as well as symbols and pictograms to replace the word-heavy traffic signs.
In designing the British road signs, Jock’s guiding principles were clarity and creating a system that would not date - Margaret Calvert
The intention was to follow the principles of the 1949 Geneva Convention on traffic signs, but with our own interpretation. This was how I got involved with the design of several signs such as School Children Crossing and Roadworks. There was also the all-important issue of what lettering to use. Jock had received a letter from Colin stating that on no account should we come up with a new letterform, as the Committee found the one used on the German autobahns perfectly adequate. We chose to ignore this, because we felt that it was a typeface designed by engineers and would not sit comfortably in the English landscape.
© Margaret Calvert. Hand-produced road sign maquettes showing motorway and all-purpose direction signs. Late 1950s, early 1960s.
It was at this point that I got involved with the design of the lettering we used on the signs, which we named Transport. It was much influenced by Akzidenz-Grotesk and incorporated important details such as the curve at the end of the lowercase ‘l’, which was borrowed from the Johnston typeface – the corporate font of public transport in London, designed by Edward Johnston. The Transport lettering was specifically designed to aid legibility, using upper and lowercase letters for place names, when viewed at a distance and when travelling at speed. It wasn’t a typeface until the digital font New Transport came into being, designed in collaboration with Henrik Kubel in 2009.
I think it must have been my passion for life drawing that gave me the necessary skill for drawing letterforms. I was never taught - Margaret Calvert
© Margaret Calvert. Transport lettering in caps and lowercase. Early 1960s
Since then, I’ve designed several new faces (not all of them serious). Most of them have been in collaboration with Henrik who is particularly brilliant at applying the technology required for creating a font. I think it must have been my passion for life drawing that gave me the necessary skill for drawing letterforms. I was never taught. In designing the British road signs, Jock’s guiding principles were clarity and creating a system that would not date. He wanted a set of minimal guidelines to aid standardisation by such companies as Buchanan Computing, headed at that time by Simon Morgan, before manufacturing of the signs took place.
© Margaret Calvert
The colours of the direction signs were extremely important. White lettering on a blue background for the motorways, because blue is recessive, causing the eye to focus on the white place names. A green background for A-route signs, with place names in white and the route numbers in yellow. Black place names and route numbers on a white background for the smaller, more local B-route signs.
The colours of the direction signs were extremely important. White lettering on a blue background for the motorways, because blue is recessive, causing the eye to focus on the white place names - Margaret Calvert
It wasn’t long after the official opening of the Preston Bypass in December 1958, Britain’s first road built to motorway standards, that the new signs came under attack from the lettering establishment, most notably from the letter cutter David Kindersley, who, uninvited, had been working on a serif letterform, and only in capitals. He thought, regarding both legibility and economy, that this was the correct answer. In true diplomatic fashion, tests were conducted by the Road Research Laboratory and comparisons made between our lettering and Kindersley’s. His lettering was rejected on aesthetic grounds.
Above, left: © Margaret Calvert. Jock Kinneir, David Tuhill and Margaret Calvert outside the garage in Old Barrack Yard. Early 1970s. Above, right: Margaret Calvert: Woman at Work at her stuido
I soon found myself designing visual identities for such diverse clients as the fishmongers Burkett and Rudman and the British Airports Authority. And it wasn’t long after the acceptance of the road sign system, by an Act of Parliament in 1965, that we were approached by the Ministry of Health to look at NHS hospital signs. This was followed by signs for the British Airports Authority and British Rail.
Words by Margaret Calvert.
