Grab the chance to visit Pick Me Up at Somerset House this weekend and don't miss this amazing collection of British Road Sign prints by Margaret Calvert, with Made North.
There’s so much wonderful stuff at this year’s Pick Me Up and one of our highlights was the chance to see of the prints and road signs that Margaret Calvert has been working on with Made North. The project follows on from last year’s 50th anniversary celebrations for Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir’s designs for the British Road Signage system – one of the most ambitious and successful information design schemes ever realised, and one that positively effects the lives of all road users to this day.
At Pick Me Up, Made North is showing a range of its projects, including beautiful limited edition A0 prints by Margaret Calvert, reproducing five of the most recognisable road signs she designed. Each design has been carefully refined by Calvert especially for this incarnation. This is typical of Calvert’s unstinting, career-long devotion to rigour in design, and an intelligent, humanist approach. When she designed the initial road sign symbols, the drawing of the cow in the ‘cattle’ warning sign was based on Patience, a cow on her relatives’ Warwickshire farm. And, eager to make the ‘school children crossing’ sign more accessible, she replaced the image of a boy in a school cap leading a little girl, with one of a girl (modelled on a photograph of herself as a child) leading a younger boy.
As well as the print series, Made North has also had replica road signs manufactured, fabricated in the same materials and scale as real road signs. We’re delighted to have one Margaret Calvert road sign (usually retailing for £150) to give away to a lucky reader, courtesy of Made North. To be in with a chance of winning simply send us your answer to the question below (clues here) before midnight Monday 9 May to giveaway@grafik.net with ‘Margaret’ in the subject line:
In what decade was Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir’s British road signage system launched to the public?
If you can’t wait, head to Pick me Up before it closes at the end of the day Monday 2 May to pick up a print or sign from the Margaret Calvert collection or any of Made North’s other fine collections.
