What is the Transport New font?
Transport New is a redrawing of the typeface designed for British road signs. In addition to the familiar Heavy and Medium weights, Transport New extrapolates and adds a previously unreleased Light weight font originally planned for back-lit signage but never actually applied. Version 3.0 of Transport New features significant improvements including numerous outline and spacing refinements, and a full complement of Latin Extended-A characters. Also, to align Transport New with the 2015 release of Motorway, the other typeface used for UK road signage, Italic fonts for all three weights have been added. More…
Originally designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert beginning in 1957 and first published on the Preston bypass in 1958, the original Transport font has subtle eccentricities which add to its distinctiveness, and drawing the New version involved walking a tightrope between impertinently eliminating awkwardness and maintaining idiosyncrasy. The Grotesk roots of the glyphs were investigated and cheekily fine-tuned – uncomfortably close terminals of characters such as 5, 6, C, G, and e were shortened, the S and s were given a more upright aspect and their protruding lower terminals tucked in, overly wide glyphs like the number 4 were narrowed, and some claustrophobic counters were slightly opened up. The question mark was redesigned and parentheses given some stroke contrast. The x height was edged fractionally even taller.
The Heavy font is actually more of a Bold, and the Light is pretty much a regular weight, but the original nomenclature has been retained for old times’ sake.
Transport New Font families
The Transport New includes the following font families:
- Transport New Light
- Transport New Light Italic
- Transport New Medium
- Transport New Medium Italic
- Transport New Heavy
- Transport New Heavy Italic
Transport New Preview
Here is a preview of how Transport New will look. For more previews using your own text as an example, click here.