Meet the woman who designed Britain’s revolutionary road signs

‘Design. Humanity’s best friend,’ proclaims a row of posters outside the Design Museum. ‘It’s the alarm that woke you up… The card you tapped on the bus… And the words you’re reading right now. So embedded in our lives we almost forget it’s there.’

It is one of the ironies of good design that the better it is, the less we notice it. This is especially true when we really need it: when lost in an airport five minutes before the gate closes or battling helplessly down the wrong road. In these instances, the woman we invariably have to thank for helping us to find our bearings is currently the subject of an overdue tribute at the Design Museum.

Margaret Calvert: Woman at Work celebrates one half of the pioneering graphic design partnership that dragged British signposting into the modern era. Along with Jock Kinneir, Calvert designed the Transport typeface adorning 270,000 miles of British roads, the Rail Alphabet flagging 2,500 British train stations and the Calvert typeface gracing the gov.uk website. To claim, as the museum does, that she ‘created the visual backdrop to modern life in Britain’ is no exaggeration: her fingerprints are all over it.

It was while studying illustration and printmaking at Chelsea in the 1950s that the South African-born Calvert impressed her tutor Kinneir as ‘the student who applied herself most rigorously to what she was doing. She kept her head down and worked like a maniac.’ So when in 1957 Kinneir won the commission to design the signage for the new Gatwick airport, he thought: ‘That’s the person I want.’ Success at Gatwick led to a commission from Sir Colin Anderson, chairman of the P&O Orient line, to design colour-coded labels to stop illiterate porters losing people’s luggage, and when Anderson was appointed head of the government committee in charge of signage for a new motorway system, Kinneir got the gig.