Margaret Calvert is a typographer and graphic designer who, along with colleague Jock Kinneir, designed many of the road signs used throughout Great Britain, as well as the Rail Alphabet used on the British railway system and an early version of the signs used in airports.
After moving to England in 1950, she studied at the Chelsea College of Art. Jock Kinneir, her tutor there, asked her to help him design the signs for Gatwick Airport, where they chose the black on yellow scheme for the signs after researching the most effective combination.
In 1957, Kinneir was appointed head of signs for Britain's roads. He then hired Calvert to redesign the road sign system and she came up with simple, easy-to-understand pictograms, most notably the signs for 'men at work' (a man digging), 'farm animals' (a cow), and 'schoolchildren nearby' (a girl leading a boy by the hand, whom she later revealed to be herself), based on pre-existing European road signs.
In addition to her road signs, she has designed commercial fonts for Monotype, including the eponymous Calvert' font, which she created for use on the Tyne and Wear Metro system.
Railway typeface designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert for British Railways.
Rail Alphabet is similar, but not identical, to a bold weight of Helvetica (and, not quite as similar, Akzidenz Grotesk or Arial). Akzidenz Grotesk had earlier also provided the same designers the broad inspiration for the Transport typeface used for all road signs in the United Kingdom.
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