Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft
Gill Sans. Its current digital version (black) with the Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft’s version (red). Redrawn characters by Phil Baines & Natalie Braune by kind permission of Monotype.
The regular seeks to restore the original metal versions of selected characters; the light and bold are are an experiment on our part, no precedent for this consistency across the weights of Gill Sans exists as far as I know.
A new comprehensive identity for the Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft in the UK.
The first public appearance of the new namestyle was in press ads in the Museums' Journal, March 2013. (The website URL is the old one).
Stationery.
East window vinyl. With a name on the building suddenly everything seems real. Installation 11 September 2013. Graphic contractors were BAF Graphics.
Writing the menu just prior to opening to the public 21 September 2013. Photo: Jackie Baines.
First drinks in the café, the logo looks good on the till roll I think.
Crockery supplied by the Big Tomato Company.
Manifestations on the glass panels and doors are the ‘+’ in Gill Sans Light from the logo used as a kind of shorthand.
Graphics panel detail.
All disks are Arizona printed on Valchromat.
All nameplates and direction signs are Arizona printed on Valchromat. While exhibition graphics are fixed with hidden fixings, these are face-fixed as though part of the building. It seemed a pragmatic decision for a building concerned with arts & crafts.
Leaflets and feedback card. What’s on and General leaflet designed with Natalie Braune.
Ticket, What’s on and General leaflets. What’s on and General leaflet designed with Natalie Braune.
Cards to announce the opening and initial print work for the museum.
The ‘arra’ on this map owes more to London Transport signage than the standard museum ‘arra’ but works better in this context.
Checking graphics at BAF Graphics, Earlsfield, prior to installation. Signs are direct to media printed on black Valchromat; exhibition panels on white sprayed MDF.
Not quite resolved logo from the presentation on 20 November 2012. Part of the whole HLF-funded project was a curatorial refocussing of the museum and this resulted in a new name. The proposed namestyle foregrounds that shift. The + is used instead of ‘and’ or ‘&’ to reflect the centrality of the catholic guild in all this art & craft. At this point the position, size and colour of ‘of’ was unresolved, as were other spatial niceties.
4 Comments on “Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft”
Thanks for posting, Phil! Very pleased to see that you brought back some of the original (and, in my opinion, superior) Gill Sans shapes. I hope this will lead to an official Monotype revival, much like their recent Metro Nova.
Ditchling Museum is indeed very beautifully laid out – one of the best looks of any museum I’ve ever been to, in fact, of any size. But with all due respect to Mr. Baines, I don’t think he’s quite the first to do this.
I’ve seen in a variety of places in the UK Gill Sans printed on signs – often on metal signs or plastic signs used by estate agents - that have been made in the last 10–20 years but that clearly haven’t used the conventional digital versions of Gill Sans sold by Monotype. Here’s an example, on a sign dated June 1999. You can see the discarded 'a’ (which often turned up on Pelican paperback covers for some reason) and a 'p’ and 'd’ with stroke terminals.
Where have these fonts come from? I don’t know. My guess is some sign manufacturer Monotype licensed the font to years ago drew it from the metal type diagrams, similarly to how Berthold had oddball redrawn versions of quite a lot of Monotype fonts for phototypesetting (although this one isn’t from Berthold, at least not from Berthold sources I’ve seen). Further information welcomed.
Firstly, thanks Phil and Natalie for doing this and showing how such a tradition can be kept alive and responsive if not actually incorporated into the official revival that was Gill Sans Nova…
Secondly, Blythwood (sorry don’t know your real name) that detail is fascinating and highly likely. If you have more examples I think the Gill Sans research community would appreciate seeing them.
FWIW, here is an item from the Monotype archive that was on display at the Gill Sans Nova launch in November 2015;
Thanks for the reply! I found your article on the history of Gill Sans really interesting and it taught me a lot about how to assess how fonts work.
I’ll see about getting example photos sent over to you if I can find some. I’ve seen Gill Sans versions with the original 'a’ in the UK on things like in vinyl on the side of a trader’s van, the painted sign of a wine shop, an enamel opening hours sign on a post office, so clearly at least one business has a custom version. Googling signage companies hasn’t turned up the source.
(Also, if we’re talking oddball Gill Sans redraws, there are a few other custom versions of Gill Sans that seem to come from Germany and turn up on some of the knock-off free font CDs, but those don’t have the original 'a’. Chantilly Serial is one of them.)