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Webpage Design - How This Site Was Designed.

The Trebuchet Font.

This website has been designed to be used with Trebuchet MS, which is comes as part of a standard Windows installation. It has a nice "retro" feel to it and is a good choice for web pages, which may be viewed by persons with a wide variety of needs and abilities.

In those days London Transport was very different from that of today - horse drawn omnibuses and the first electric tramcars. The Underground used steam trains, with huge vents in the pavements to let the smoke out. The lettering of station signs and suchlike had to be so clear, that commuters could recognise their destination by the shapes of the words - one of the main reasons being that quite a sizeable proportion of the population were still illiterate.

Although this has long since ceased to be the case, the font is still used and London Transport's distinctive signing is recognised the world over.

Colour Coding.

You may also have noticed that the various sections of this website are colour-coded by subject. This is a very common feature of many websites but, alas, is far from a new innovation!

London Transport produced their first colour-coded Underground map in 1908. Although it looks very different from today's extensive map, colour-coding as a navigational aid is still fundamental. This idea was also adopted in other cities - Glasgow's trams had different coloured bands depending on their route, a situation which prevailed right up until the 1950's. First Bus in Aberdeen re-introduced the concept of colour coded routemaps in 2001.

Even today, many examples of colour-coding as a visual aid can be found, from electrical components such as resistors to clothing sizes in shops.