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This is the website of Doug Rose. |
| Site last updated: 31st March 2008. |
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| Having been interested in public transport from an early age, I grew up in the era of Routemaster buses being built and learnt my way round London with extensive use of Red Rover tickets during the school holidays. These were exciting times but I still lamented the passing of trolleybuses. Naively, I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t have both – why did one have to replace the other? Somehow London’s streets didn’t look right afterwards, not being held together by all those overhead wires. It was not all bad though – to this day I still find the aesthetics of Routemasters faultless. |
| When I was about twelve years old my mother wondered why I was spending hours on the floor faithfully copying a page of the London A-Z onto a sheet of cartridge paper, in pencil, by eye. Why indeed? Well it was something to do. Following a visit to London Zoo, I broadened my horizons and moved up to coloured pencils, and copied the zoo map. I then went diagrammatic and drew my own London Underground map (shame it was in the Hutchison era). |
| I left school at 16 (couldn’t get away soon enough) and trained as a cartographer; this rapidly led to an interest in typography, signage, information design and printing. This in turn made me aware, and then soon in awe, of the (Edward) Johnston typeface that I had been looking at during my formative years, not realizing why it existed, nor why it did its job so astonishingly well. How could a typeface look so simple and work so very well? Answer: it is not simple – because the designer worked so hard and did such a terrific job of fooling us into making it look simple. |
| I have based my professional career on my appreciation of the great man’s work and the principles of clarity and unambiguity. Someone said to me a few years’ ago that an awful lot of effort goes into making something look effortless. |
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