New Light Weight Transport
As well as being inspired by art and artists, K-Type has a history of being moved by transportation, right down to our chevron logo. So it’s no surprise that a reworking of the UK Transport fonts should feature in our landscape. Originally designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert beginning in 1957, Transport has been used on road signs in Medium and Heavy weights ever since, but a third weight originally planned for back-lit signage was never actually applied. K-Type’s Transport New revives the previously unreleased Light weight in a three font package.
The New version impertinently includes delicate refinements – nudging apart uncomfortably close strokes of characters such as 5, 6, C, G, and e, tucking in the protruding lower terminals of S and s, improving proportions by narrowing overly wide glyphs like the number 4, and slightly opening up some claustrophobic counters. The question mark is made nicer, and parentheses are less chunky – slimmer than letters and numbers. The x height is edged fractionally even taller. New characters such as the Euro symbol have been added, along with many accented characters for Welsh and continental European use, and the © copyright symbol cheekily becomes the Congestion Charge logo.