The Pooh stories are timeless because they’re not laden with morality 
Happy birthday … the tube logo has been a familiar part of London life for 100 years. Photograph: PA
The London Transport roundel is one of the earliest, best, most familiar and enduring of all corporate logos. It’s been around in one guise or another for exactly 100 years ago this autumn, when the various privately owned Underground railway companies decided to merge their identities for the convenience of the millions of passengers who travelled on their trains every day.
The first roundel logo, known as the “bullseye” or “target”, consisted of a solid red disc crossed, at its equator, with a blue bar on which the name of the station was written in somewhat clumsy white sans-serif lettering. Frank Pick [1878-1941], commercial and publicity manager of the London Underground Group of Companies knew that the symbol was a good one, but not good enough. He liked the contemporary YMCA logo, which used a triangle, voids and a crossbar, and began toying with his own designs for an improved “bullseye” and the lettering to go with it. A highly cultured businessman with the sharpest of eyes, Pick was, however, neither an artist nor a typographer. The problem was resolved when he was introduced to Edward Johnston [1872-1944], the brilliant arts and crafts calligrapher, who turned the 1908 “bullseye” into a strikingly handsome and wholly convincing symbol by 1917.
Johnston worked on the design over a number of years, and had perfected its balance and proportions by the time the architect Charles Holden began incorporating it into the distinctive Underground stations he designed from the 1920s, including the brilliant Arnos Grove and Southgate Piccadilly Line stations of the early 1930s.
As for lettering, Johnston designed his superb sans-serif capitals for Pick between 1913 and 1916. This was eventually conjured into a typeface, and was to inspire such classic modern types as Gill Sans and many of the best German and Swiss designs of the 1920s and 30s.
By the time Pick was managing director and chief executive of the London Passenger Transport Board, a public corporation formed in 1933 that brought pretty much all public transport operations in London under the umbrella of a single controlling organisation, the Johnston logo was truly ubiquitous. And the LPTB learned to relax. Artists designing posters and publicity material played creatively with the logo under Pick’s benign direction. It might pop up as the wheels of a stylised bus, the head of a rushing commuter, a planet (as in Man Ray’s famous 1938 poster) or even a flying saucer.
The talented German graphic designer Hans Schleger [1898-1970] designed a simplified “bullseye” for a new generation of modern London Transport bus stops in 1935, while the proportions of the Johnston logo were significantly altered in 1972, by the Design Research Unit led by Misha Black, as part of a complete overhaul of London Transport’s corporate identity. This is when the logo was named the roundel.
Further changes were by Henrion, Ludlow and Schmidt in 1984, and a New Johnston typeface designed to accompany it. By this time, detailed guides laying down the law as to how and when to use company typefaces and logos were very much the norm across industries worldwide. Although polished, the sense of adventure and even fun nurtured by Frank Pick all those decades ago were beginning to be lost. So, it’s good to see Art on the Underground commissioning 100 contemporary artists to make new works of art inspired by a century of the “bullseye” and “roundel”. These will be on display at the A Foundation Gallery at the Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, London, from October 9-30 2008. A selection of the works will be mass-produced as posters for display throughout the Underground network.
The roundel is a fine example of a logo or corporate symbol that has evolved over a long time while remaining one of the most effective, and popular, in use anywhere in the world today. The fact that it enters its second century in the spirit of creative art would have pleased its original creators no end. Pick wanted London’s public transport system to be as much a work of civic art, and an inspiration everyone using it, as a quick, cheap and reliable method of getting from A to B - or, indeed, Amersham to Brixton.