Queen's Gate (City of Westminster Street Nameplate)

The design for the City of Westminster street nameplate, by Chris Timings at Design Research Unit in 1967, is an exemplar of what matured into modernist typographic design in the mid-twentieth century. The nameplate layout utilizes a condensed sans serif typeface in black and red, resembling the Adrian Frutiger designed typeface Univers. It is aligned left, with minimal punctuation, simplicity and legibility being the key values in the overall design. These qualities derive from the pioneering experimental work of early Russian avant-guard artists and such as El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. In the early twenty-first century the design has been increasingly copied for use by other local authorities as well as various other graphic communication functions for fashion, retail, theatre, broadcast media, or property promotion, to name a few, justifying its label as an 'iconic' design.