Jonathan Barnbrook

The Brief

This Brief is the fourth creative networks brief, with there being three left since the colour event we, as a trio decided it was best if we take turns in a leadership role for the final three events. This event was lead by myself for the guest speaker Jonathan Barnbrook. The brief we set ourselves was to visually engage a student audience with pre event posters leading up to the event, and to celebrate Jonathan Barnbrook as a designer on the night of his talk.

Research

From looking at Barnbrook's typefaces and why he created them we were lead to some political reasoning and inspiration. Barnbrook's typefaces are often based on cultural and social issues that he feels need to highlighted. We decided to take this approach for this project so we researched the current panama papers tax scandal.

This research lead to insurance company Mossack Fonseca who were behind the papers leaking and regarded as unethical by some.



Visual research of Barnbrook's work was executed to try and reflect his style of working through our own work. As you can see from the image above and the following images his work includes a lot of red black and white these colours create a great contrast and are great for communication so we decided to take influence from his colour choices and incorporate them into our own work.

Ideas for pre event posters

My initial reaction to Barnbrook's work was that his typography was quite unorthodox and experimental. So I decided to experiment with some foam board letters that disregarded the use of cap height and baselines and instead the typeface was set vertically. 

I then sprayed these letters red, photographed them at an interesting angle and experimented with some layouts. 

Although This initial idea was interesting it didn't communicate enough of Barnbrook as the link between typography experiments was weak and the only resemblance to his work was the colour choices. 

We had a brainstorm between us and thought of just experimenting with Barnbrook's typefaces and some coloured stocks. We wanted to link barnbrook effectively to the college.

Here we tried to replicate the lecture theatre using red black and white stock. The 3d aspect of this poster would attract students as this poster would stand out from all the flat posters around the university.






Here we took influence from the fact that a 3d poster would have more impact within the college and decided to layer a poster using various stocks and foam board. We laser cut one of barnbrooks typefaces to link the poster to his work.



We tried removing the white but legibility was immediately flawed.



We also tried making the black layer relate to some of the intricate patterns we researched in Barnbrook's work. This caused problems on the laser cutter though.



We also tried hand cutting the stock as this gave us more freedom to experiment rather than just design onto a screen. Above is one of Barnbrook's letters used as a stencil.



Again here we tried to capture the intricate patterns we noticed in his work from our research.



During a crit with the Creative Networks event organisers we were told that the posters were heading in an interesting direction and they agreed with making them 3d for impact. We agreed that the white should be included to increase contrast and that the layout should be slightly changed at the bottom.

Pre event poster 

Creating a Typeface

After Creating the pre event posters we thought of what we could do to celebrate barnbrook as a designer. We decided on taking the panama papers tax scandal and creating a typeface based on Mossac Fonseca's logo 

Here we took an element from the logo and used it to make the starting point of our typeface the letter "I"

We continued to experiment with the typeface drawing out letter ideas 

Finished typeface

We based our typeface of the shapes of letters from the typeface Gotham, The process of creating these letters was to look at our drawings and simplify them digitally. Once we had the arrows from the letter I it was a simple but laborious task of re shaping each arrow to fit the skeleton of Gotham.

The Event

For the event we wanted to make it as clear as possible that the typeface we had created wasn't Jonathan's. We did this by creating beer mats expelling the typeface and also having an explanation on an easel as the guests came in.

Our beer mats were appreciated and created an engaging piece of print for the guests of Creative Networks.



We created posters displaying current affairs and political issues, this allowed us to expand our typeface so that it no longer just represented the panama papers, it is now a typeface recognisable and unique enough to be used to highlight any social or political issue. This relates well to Barnbrook's practice as he often works towards social change.







We used black and white vinyl to guide the guests to the lecture theatre where the talk was taking place these vinyls are directly influenced by our type face.









We removed all orange chairs from the event to keep the black white and red colour scheme. We also bought black table cloths for the evening.

Evaluation

This brief was enjoyable and was very successful, Guests were engaged by our work and the work helped to celebrate Jonathan Barnbrook as a graphic designer. We created a typeface as a reflection of Barnbrook’s work process and linked it to relevant cultural and political concerns which is something that Barnbrook’s typefaces often do. We had a full house of guests including both industry and students which is evidence that our pre event advertisements were successful. The floor vinyl was clear and functional as way-finding and was informed by the typeface design. The group even went as far as purchasing black table cloths and removing all orange chairs to really keep continuity across the event.