'g' is a 'two-storey' design. The 'l' copies the curl of the 't' and produces a rather wide letter compared to most sans-serif fonts. The lower case i and j have diagonally-placed square dots or tittles, a motif that in some digitisations is repeated in the full stop, commas, apostrophes and other punctuation marks. Johnston's design process considered a variety of eccentricities, such as a capital-form 'q' in the lower-case and a single-storey 'a' like that later seen on Futura, before ultimately discarding them in favour of a clean, simplified design. However, many early versions of Johnston's "alphabet" included a Garamond-style W formed of two crossed 'V's, and some early renderings as hand-lettering showed variation. Unlike many sans-serifs of the period, Johnston's design (while not slender) is not particularly bold. Gill would later write of his admiration for how Johnston had "redeemed" the sans-serif from its "nineteenth-century corruption" of extreme boldness. As an alphabet intended for signage, Johnston was designed without any italics. Any italic design seen is therefore an invention of a later designer, intended to match Johnston's design. Different designers have chosen different approaches to achieve this: some offering a 'true' italic, others an oblique in which the letters are simply slanted, and some declining to offer one, perhaps concluding that an italic is inappropriate to the purpose of the original design. An official version of the typeface in italics was commissioned by London Transport from Berthold Wolpe in 1973. History Johnston had become interested in sans-serif letters some years before the commission: although best known as a calligrapher, he had written and worked also on custom lettering, and in his 1906 textbook Writing and Illuminating and Lettering had noted "It is quite possible to make a beautiful and characteristic alphabet of equal-stroke letters, on the lines of the so-called 'block letter' [the sans-serif letters of contemporary trade] but properly proportioned and finished." He had also written in spring 1913 that new books should "bear some living mark of the time in which we live." Johnston had previously unsuccessfully attempted to enter type design, a trade which at the time normally made designs in-house. Howes wrote that Johnston's font was "the first typeface to have been designed for day-to-day use by a leading artist-craftsman." Pick specified to Johnston that he wanted a typeface that would ensure that the Underground Group's posters would not be mistaken for advertisements; it