People often ask what motivates me to go through the painstaking process of drawing fonts, It comes from wanting to directly express my own environment and speak in a “voice” that I and those around me understand. When I was younger I felt really disheartened about the amount of American visual language that people were happy to wear or absorb into culture. We know that all cultures are influenced by others but it seemed that American mass-culture motivated to a large extent by ideas of ‘profit’ had no regard for other visual languages. So I wanted to get back to the idea of what was unique about where I came from. This was expressed for me in different ways—a love of British pop music in which people sing about places and events that I understand. Another was the environment, namely trying to understand the historical and emotional atmosphere of where I was born. As I became a designer, lettering seemed to be the area where the idea of “English” came through most.
There is a strong tradition of British lettering with its own history and its own unique “atmosphere,” which was almost the opposite of what was prevalent from America. I wanted to look at this British heritage and show other people this beauty that I saw. These things were not necessarily pieces of graphic design. They would include an old piece of lettering on a building front from the 1940s, for instance, or a sign on the gate of a park, or the typography on some gravestones. One of the typographers who seemed to incorporate these ideas of “English” was Eric Gill (designer of Perpetua and Gill amongst others). I think he drew what I consider to be some of the most beautiful letters, and because he was also a stone carver he drew figuratively a lot. I consider drawing to be very important to being a good type designer, far more important than knowing the latest software. Typography is about fashion, but that is not all it is about. Anyone who wants to be good at it has to do it properly and learn how to construct the letterforms in a traditional way. Only then can you understand the parameters of type as “subversion.”
Drawing typefaces is as much an intellectual exercise as an aesthetic one. Typefaces are concerned with language and all of the contradictions of meanings, misunderstandings, violence, beauty, poetry that is in language. These qualities all have the potential to be expressed in letterforms.
I didn’t really learn about type design at college. I didn’t really get any teaching at art school. It seems in Britain they don’t teach it very thoroughly. I am not sure why. Maybe they think the students would be bored, or maybe the tutors do not know it themselves. Anyway, I learned partially through instinct, partially through reading books on how to construct letterforms, but mainly from a passion for the history of type. I looked with fascination at the thousands of beautiful examples through the past few thousand years of letterform design, absorbed it, got to understand all of the different ways and methods of constructing letterforms that way.
I am often asked why my typography is so political, but I would answer that typography has always been political—printed words are an effective form of propaganda (The Christian church for example saw it as the best way to distribute its propaganda). I would also like to answer the many designers who ask, “Why is your typography so political?” with this question, “Why doesn’t your work relate to the world outside design and outside your studio?”.
One of the questions that students put to me when I give lectures is “How do you start a typeface?” Well, I don’t sit down and think, “I have got to come up with a typeface”. It comes through being an artist, observing the world and trying to put a bit of that world into my work. As I mentioned earlier typefaces always speak in a certain ‘voice’. Often the process of drawing is just revealing that voice that you have observed. Or it can be wanting to express a particular voice from inside yourself that you feel needs expressing.
There are also other agendas I have. First is the craft—to draw the font well with good proportion. Another thing is to deal with the meaning and transference of that meaning in language. Finally, an unease about what typefaces are used for. I don’t have control over how a typeface is used once it is released, but what I want to do is make people realize that typeface design and graphic design are part of the propaganda that many companies put out to produce a good image when they are doing things to cause damage to the environment and much human misery. This unease is often represented by the names of my typefaces, such as “Bastard” which was for corporate fascists, or “Nixon” which was for telling lies, or “Drone” which is for text without content.
Usually the typefaces start off as very rough characters drawn in my sketchbook. These are roughed out when I am traveling or they can come out through the process of investigating the ways you can produce the construction of letterforms. Usually I have drawn some of the letters of a typeface 30 or 40 times before I start to draw them properly. This gives me a feeling for the letters. Then these rough sketches are drawn up on the computer, not traced, but referred to. It is then a process of refining. Working on computers can be difficult because everything is in sharp black and white and doesn’t often allow you the softness of a rough pencil drawing, so often it would look terrible with the first printout. but after many hours of refining, it will start to look acceptable.
I think sometimes my typefaces can be difficult to use because they look like they come from my own universe so much. Somebody said to me, “You are one of the few designers whose fonts are like your own handwriting.” So it can be difficult for other people to do a piece of work that uses it in a different way. However, I am often sent pieces of work where designers have found something new within a new font. This always delights me—for others to perceive what was your thought, your directed ideology in a completely unexpected way.
The new fonts are some which come from existing projects, but then there is never the division of private and public work.
Coma was designed to be used in a Japanese magazine called “Kohkoku” which we recently redesigned. The new design was based on a square format, so the characters were based on the square. This has the dual function of being able to be used both horizontally and vertically in conjunction with Japanese without problems. The name Coma, has to do with a condition of modern life, I think, but also because these were the first characters drawn for the font.
Expletive script is a script font based on a circular form. It has a unique feeling in that the characters go above and below the baseline. The name “Expletive” means “to swear.” It is about the possibility for the violence of language—that you can swear, be aggressive, or use it to express beauty. I find it funny that there are words you can’t say, and that these words constantly change as to what is acceptable and what is not. There is a parallel with letterform design also—Baskerville’s letterforms in the 19th century were thought to be illegible and very experimental for their time and now they look very traditional.
Echelon has the simplest explanation. It was an experiment based on many typefaces that appeared in the 1970s which looked like they were made of a metal type or a singular line. This was looking at those kinds of fonts, some of which are used in Eastern Europe and which I had seen when I traveled there. I was trying to add a bit of rougher, slightly naive drawing to the shapes and to make a more contemporary version of these sorts of fonts.
Melancholia is the one that took most time, and I think it is the most major font we have done in a long time. It certainly was a lot of work. It is not based on any specific historical reference; it just evolved from hopefully interesting drawing of the characters. What I suppose is most interesting about the font is that it is sans serif yet with an alternative set of characters with flourishes that you would normally only see in fonts from the 18th and 19th centuries that are serif. I was trying to put this piece of typographic history in a contemporary context. Also we worked hard on the italic. Often when people draw a sans serif italic, all they do is a redrawn sloped version of the roman. We went back to some of the original italics, such as Garamond, and used these for the basis of the italic drawings.
The name “Melancholia” comes from those “atmospheres” that I was talking about trying to express when I was younger. “Melancholia” is a mental disease to do with depression, but it sounded so poetic when I read the name. It speculates that maybe melancholia was the disease of people who were sensitive to the brutality of everyday society. It seemed to match the delicate look of the font. It is, I suppose, how I felt when I was younger, and how a lot of people feel, I think.
Click here to be taken to FontShop’s font area, where you can try Virus fonts and buy online. |  |
Highlight: Virus Fonts
Click here to be taken to FontShop’s font area, where you can try Virus fonts and buy online.
Apocalypso is a font of approximately 75 different pictograms and 50 different crosses which will immediately become very, very useful when the destruction of the world happens at the day of judgement (or something like that).
Bastard is an attempt to draw blackletter forms in a modern context—it was necessary to acknowledge that they were drawn on a computer rather than by a pen. As a result a set of modular parts was devised to construct a gothic font with a contemporary feel.
Delux: life enhancing, resource using, environment destroying, ozone depleting, labor exploiting, rainforest using, ghetto creating, space-junk making, inequality producing, government corrupting, designer-label, utterly useless Delux.
Drone is derived from lettering seen on the front of Hispanic Catholic churches. Letterforms which have tried to mimic the religious typography of Western Renaissance but drawn with a naive eye which produces a beautiful (badly) drawn aesthetic of its own.
False Idol is based on bad rubdown lettering in 1970s pornographic magazines [which Barnbrook says he hasn’t seen]. It is a fake attempt to mimic an atmosphere of glamor and sophistication, but achieves only a certain fractured seediness.
Newspeak is based on letterforms from Stalinist Russia—shapes which have a decadent visual tendency and a sinister political undertone. The name comes from the novel 1984 by George Orwell—a term for an invented language so that people cannot express themselves outside the ideological doctrine enforced by the dictatorship.
Nixonscript, looking like glitches on a lie detector, is very loosely derived from a piece of lettering seen on an old 1960s camera in a junk shop—it evokes pious typography from the Vatican meeting the self-celebration of ‘the price is right’ pop typography. Nixonscript, as the name suggests, is a font with which one can lie.
Nylon is taken from letterforms in paintings from the 13th through 16th centuries, a period when there seemed to be a manic range of diseased shapes which had very little to do with the classic ideal.
Draylon, a mix-and-match companion to Nylon, is a much more restrained, elegant typeface (but drawn in a contemporary way) based on 17th and 18th century typography.
Patriot is a sans version of Barnbrook’s ubiquitous Exocet (Emigre). The letterforms are based on primitive Greek and Roman stonecarving where primitive geometric shapes are used for the main construction.
Prototype is a new universal alphabet, not utopian as with the modernist experiments but with a very 20th/21st century identity crisis. Are they new, old, uppercase, lowercase, serif or sans serif? Prototype’s characters have never been seen before, yet offer the irritating familiarity of a played-to-death pop song.
Prozak takes all letterforms down to six basic shapes which are either flipped or rotated to make the whole alphabet. Prozak is specifically designed to simplify all communications processes and forget existential angst.
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