Meet Sociotype’s Ceno & Meso: sans and serif families that share DNA

When Joe Leadbeater’s train terminated unexpectedly at Sudbury Town station in North West London, one sign caught his attention. Unlike the familiar Johnston lettering that defines the Underground, this sign bore tiny serifs – a peculiar detail that led him to discover Percy Delf Smith’s Petit Serif, a 1929 modification of Edward Johnston’s iconic alphabet trialled at just this one location across all 272 Underground stations. That chance encounter sparked Meso, the serif counterpart to Sociotype’s sans serif Ceno, marking the London-based foundry’s first sans/serif pairing. Both families draw from Johnston’s Underground lettering, commissioned in 1913 by Frank Pick with the brief to create an alphabet retaining “the bold simplicity of the authentic lettering of the finest periods” while belonging “unmistakably to the twentieth century.” For Leadbeater, Co-founder of Sociotype and type designer behind both families, Johnston’s work holds particular significance. “I’m a proud Londoner, and to me – Johnston’s underground lettering is London,” he explains. “New York is Helvetica, and London is Johnston. I don’t think there’s any other typeface I’ve read more than Johnston.” The discovery of Petit Serif opened an unexpected research path. “It was a bit of a light bulb moment,” Leadbeater recalls. Searching for other humanist sans with “bolted on” serifs, the team found nothing from Johnston’s era but discovered a cluster from the 1970s and 80s – Tony Di Spigna’s Serif Gothic, Philip Kelly’s Cortez, and Adrian Frutiger’s lesser-known Icone. “These references really pushed the boundaries of how a humanist sans could be modified,” notes Leadbeater. “The resulting usages of these typefaces were often sci-fi, or thriller novels.”