Design Doyenne: Tracking the Barnbrook Virus

In a new venture for the studio, Jonathan has hooked up with the Japanese retail chain Beams, which introduced a “Virus Collection” based on Barnbrook’s designs. (Please do check out the Beams site for the visuals and Jonathan’s photo, but unless you download Japanese character sets, it’ll look a little odd.) Beams has 40 stores throughout Japan with a target audience of trendy 20-to-30 year olds. Jonathan’s assignment from the company was open-ended, a daunting prospect that he says was “paralyzing.” He ultimately produced labels, posters, postcards, textiles, T-shirts, a watch, and typefaces, for which he reworked his Bastard and Newspeak fonts into Katankana fonts.

For Japan’s Beams retail chain, Barnbrook designed posters, postcards, and other collateral.

Barnbrook produced textile designs for Beams

Barnbrook’s typographic treatments play with the Beams logo

In many ways the Virus Collection, Jonathan says, meshes with contemporary Japanese obsessions. His T-shirt designs for “stalker” and “cult” leap right from Japanese headlines.

Barnbrook’s Virus Collection T-shirt designs reflect contemporary Japanese culture.

If Jonathan’s own obsessions can be tracked it is in his typeface designs. Virus fonts are his continuing work, so his latest typeface Moron — play off of his previous typeface Nylon — is a Barnbrook statement about how graphic design is used all over the world. Jonathan describes Moron as nice but nasty at the same time; he wants to populate the world with it.

Barnbrook’s Moron typeface plays off his previous Nylon design.

Next spring, watch for the Barnbrook touch in the poster and catalog for the Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition in Los Angeles called “Public Offerings,” featuring the early work of artists who are now at the peak of their careers, such as Matthew Barney, Renee Green, Damien Hirst (again!), Steve McQueen, Takashi Murakami, Tuyoshi Ozawa, Manfred Pernice, Diana Thater, and Rachel Whiteread.

London has been lovely as always, but I’m coming home so will let you know what some of the local heroes are up to next time.

Can’t wait to check in with you.

Yours truly,

Margaret

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