Usage
First unveiled in a single uppercase weight in 1928, Gill Sans achieved national prominence almost immediately, when it was chosen the following year to become the standard typeface for the LNER railway system, soon appearing on every facet of the company's identity, from locomotive nameplates and station signage to restaurant car menus, printed timetables and advertising posters.
When British Railways was created by nationalisation in 1948, Gill Sans was used in much of its printed output, including timetables. Specially drawn variations were developed by the British Transport Commission for signs, but these characters are not authentic Gill. The corporate rebranding of BR as British Rail in 1965 introduced Rail Alphabet for signage, and Helvetica and/or Univers for printed matter. Other users included Penguin Books' iconic paperback jacket designs from 1935, and Gill Sans became Monotype's fifth best selling typeface of the twentieth century.
The typeface continues to thrive to this day, often being held to bring an artistic or cultural sensibility to an organisation's corporate style. Monotype themselves use it in their corporate style, and the typeface was prominently used by many public service organisations. These include Railtrack (and now Network Rail), which used Gill Sans for printed matter, the Church of England, which adopted Gill Sans as the typeface for the definitive Common Worship family of service books published from 2000, and the British Government, which formally adopted Gill Sans as its standard typeface for use in all communications and logos in 2003. The BBC adopted the typeface as its corporate typeface in 1997. Until 2006, the corporation used the font in all its media output; however, the unveiling of its new idents for BBC One and BBC Two has signalled a shift away from its universal use, as other fonts were used for their respective on-screen identities, but the BBC logo still uses the typeface.
Since 2001, Gill Sans is the official corporative typeface of the Spanish Government, (Gobierno de España).
On the business side, Saab Automobile adopted the font for almost all of its advertising and marketing communications.
Edward Tufte, the information design theorist, uses Gill Sans on his website and in some of his published works.
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