Now Boarding: the Story of Airport
by Lukas Schneider

On 13 November 1961, the Oceanic building at London Airport opened to handle long-haul flight departure. In 1979, German publisher Ravensburger brought out a game designed to help children learn to count. Around Christmas 2023, I stumbled across a copy of that vintage game. The type on the box caught my eye, and that’s where this story began.

The letterforms resembled those of Helvetica. As the corners were soft, I initially thought it might be its Rounded version. However, the typeface featured a much larger x-height, the capitals were less wide, and the glyphs also had white bits in some places, yielding a highlight effect. I had never seen this design before. My first suspicion was that it might be a Letraset face, as this would have fitted in well with the release date of the game. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a match in a catalog by this manufacturer of rub-down type, so I contacted Florian Hardwig, who had often helped me with type research in the past. Florian was able to identify the mystery typeface. He found it in a catalog published in 1985 by Layout-Setzerei Stulle, a typesetting service in Stuttgart, Germany. Named Airport Spotlight, it’s a derivative of Airport, a typeface that Matthew Carter had designed in the early 1960s for signs at London Airport. The Stulle catalog also showed other variants, such as Airport Round, the stencilled Airport Stamp, and Carter’s original style, here listed as Airport halbfett.

Up to this point, I hadn’t really looked into the history of London Airport – since 1966 known as Heathrow Airport – and its design language in any depth, not least because there isn’t a great deal of material on the subject. To my knowledge, there are only two books on this typeface. One is “Airport Wayfinding” by Heike Nehl and Sibylle Schlaich from 2021. The other is “A Sign System Manual” by Theo Crosby, Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes from 1970. I found the topic quite intriguing and began to do more research. As a first step, I got my hands on the two books. The former is easy to get hold of. The latter not so much: considered a design classic today, it has become a sought-after item. And when a copy does pop up, booksellers ask several hundred euros for it. Despite the limited supply, I eventually managed to find a comparably inexpensive copy from a private seller in the UK. Thanks to the help of a good friend, the book was brought from London to Antwerp by train and then sent to me in Germany by mail. The effort was more than worth it. The content and typography of the book are superb. In a next step, I contacted Matthew Carter to find out more about his Airport and how it came into being.

Commercial aviation grew rapidly in the post-war years. In consequence, airports had to become more capable, too. After Building 1 “Europa” in 1955 and Building 2 “Britannic” in 1956, a third central terminal building was added in 1961. Named “Oceanic” (and later known as Terminal 3), it was to add to Heathrow as a place representative of the new Britain. The prestigious project was spearheaded by an architectural and graphic style that was bold, modern, and in line with the Jet Age. Up-and-coming designer Colin Forbes (1928–2022) was commissioned to work on the new signs, in coordination with architect Frederick Gibberd (1908–1984). Forbes brought in Matthew Carter (b.1937) – who was freelancing in London at the time – to draw a sans-serif typeface for the purpose. The idea was to start with Akzidenz-Grotesk, known in the UK under the export name Standard, and adapt it to a set of letters suitable for a sign face.
According to “A Sign Systems Manual”, Akzidenz-Grotesk “fulfils the criteria of simple, bold, easily identifiable letterforms, with an individual but unaggressive personality not found in some of the more mechanical alternatives”.
Carter recalls: “Working for Colin Forbes on the airport alphabet was very straightforward. He instructed me to base the design on Akzidenz but to change the terminals to horizontal. The only change that happened during the design process was the decision to make the lowercase x-height larger by shortening the ascenders and descenders and shrinking the capitals photographically.” The stated rationale for raising the x-height was to maximize legibility, “as signs are often required to be read and recognized at a distance and generally at speed”. Adjusting the angles of all stroke terminals to be horizontally or vertically “was considered an optical advantage for words used in large scale”. The Akzidenz ancestry is still evident in glyphs like 2, y, J. Carter also simplified the letterforms and made them more uniform in thickness, in a weight that sits between the medium and bold styles of Akzidenz.

In many regards, the adaptations made to Akzidenz echo the considerations made in the design of Helvetica. In an interview for Computer Arts, Carter comments: “[I]f you look at it today, you'd think was a rip-off of Helvetica. But we’d never seen Helvetica in 1961 in London, although it had been produced in Switzerland near Basle at the Haas foundry in 1957. Even if we had seen it, and wanted to have it typeset in London, we’d have had to get on a plane and fly to Basle and have it typeset there, because the British typesetting trade was so conservative that typefaces like that were simply unobtainable.”