Way finder

Graphic design doyenne Margaret Calvert on drawing a successor to her classic alphabet for UK railways

- DEYAN SUDJIC

Margaret Calvert uses a vintage parallel-motion drawing board as a work table. Half-hidden under a snowdrift of drawings and sketches, it’s almost invisible in a corner of her living room. Above the drawing board, next to a Mark Rothko postcard, is a miniature version of the blue motorway sign that signals the Dunstable turn-off on the UK’s M1 motorway, a fragment of the signage system that she created with Jock Kinneir (Kinneir was Calvert’s tutor at the Chelsea School of Art, and recruited her to work with him in 1957, while she was still a student).

Pinned up behind the table are drawings of individual letters, component parts of a contemporary successor to Rail Alphabet. Calvert designed the original alphabet 55 years ago, part of British Rail’s then radical new look (including the double-arrow logo by the Design Research Unit).