A modern humanist sans grounded in the ‘Essential form’ of Edward Johnston’s Underground lettering, and a playful serif counterpart inspired by experimental serifs of the 1970s.
Sociotype’s first sans/serif pairing, Meso & Ceno are two sibling families of 16 styles each, with 848 glyphs per style, and a variable font that allows blending between sans and serif, weight and even italic angle.
The primary influence on Ceno is, of course, Edward Johnston’s Underground lettering, commissioned in 1913 by Frank Pick, to unify the disparate identities of the railway firms absorbed by the rapidly expanding Underground Electric Railways Company of London.
Pick briefed Johnston to create an alphabet that would retain ‘the bold simplicity of the authentic lettering of the finest periods’ while belonging ‘unmistakably to the twentieth century’.
As a craftsman, Johnston occupied a position at the tipping point between tradition and 20th century Modernism. A master calligrapher who worked with a quill and shunned mechanical reproduction, he nevertheless created one of the foundational forms of modern typography.
He based his monolinear alphabet upon the ‘essential form’ or ‘distinctive and proportionate structure’ of traditional calligraphic letterforms, as described in his 1906 book Writing & Illuminating & Lettering.
Johnston actually designed his iconic London alphabet at home in Ditchling, a small village with an influential creative community known for its celebration of pre-industrial craft production. The village lies on the cusp of the South Downs, a dramatic range of chalk hills with a long tradition of craft expression through landscape, in the form of hill figure geoglyphs.
Details reminiscent of Johnston’s design include the vertically cut apertures (C,G) and the triangular beak on the crossbar of the lowercase t (available as a stylistic set). But Ceno is no revival, and Johnston’s alphabet is an inspiration rather than a template.
Ceno’s uppercase follows classic proportions to a point, with conventional square capitals (O, H and X), though the characters that are usually more condensed, such as R,S and J, are noticeably wider than standard classic proportions.
Ceno diverges from Johnston’s monolinearity, with smoother connections to the stem and higher contrast tapering where shoulder meets stem in lowercase characters.
There are also many features more typical of grotesks, including the curved strokes of the 9 and 6, vertical cuts on Z and 2, and the full height vertex on uppercase M.
Johnston’s design was modified in 1929 by Percy Delf Smith, who added tiny serifs to create a ‘petit serif’ style of lettering for use at the UERL headquarters at 55 Broadway (which, at a modest 10 floors plus clock tower, holds the title of London’s first skyscraper) and later for signage at several stations on the Piccadilly line.
Smith’s update never found favour and was later replaced with the original sans serif. The design survived at only one outer London station – Sudbury Town – a chance encounter with which inspired Ceno’s sibling, Meso.
The idea to graft serifs onto a monolinear sans led us to 1970s experimental typefaces like Tony Di Spigna’s Serif Gothic (1972) and Phillip Kelly’s Cortez, (1977), whose unusual combination of tradition and futurism saw it briefly become synonymous with pulp sci-fi, and to Adrian Frutiger’s lesser-known Icone (1980), with its unusual asymmetric serifs.
In some ways these serif experiments echo Johnston’s own combination of Roman proportions with Modernist rationality. And although today they feel very much of their time, there’s an unapologetic attitude that we sought to tap into with Meso, particularly in its heavier weights. Indeed weight is perhaps the most defining characteristic of Meso’s personality, from the genteel lighter weights, through an authoritative Albertus-like mid-range, to the punchy and playful heavier end.
Just as Johnston’s calligraphy was built upon an underlying ‘essential form’, Meso is fundamentally built on Ceno’s skeleton, retaining the same contrast and weight.
However in addition to Meso’s serifs and flared terminals, there are differences in how strokes are cut and a subtle increase in title size on the lowercase i.
Frutiger originally intended Icone to be a design that the user could digitally modify, changing slant and stroke width.*
Almost 45 years later, Ceno and Meso make good on that promise with a variable font that allows interpolation between sans and serif families, in addition to weight and italic slant.
Ceno & Meso’s 14 stylistic sets offer a wealth of options to modulate between the design’s humanist origins and its more atypical features, with alternates including single and double-story characters, humanist features, alternate ampersands, circled characters and arrow styles.
Download a PDF specimen to view all the important information in one place – samples of every style in the family, character sets, OpenType features, language coverage and details of every available license.