Modern Typography: the world of Paul Barnes

Within his talk he gives the audience snippets of his career client’s request and what the clients has requested of him and his team to make.

We get to know what types of font he has created over the years and what he personally think of people buying fonts, stealing fonts and having fonts off free download websites.

I guess you could say it was a preview into how he works in the font industry.

Karen Pang

Kate Moss typeface

In 2005, when he got a request to created a typeface for the greatest lady in the world, he thought it would be for the Queen and which would have finally made his mother proud.

However, it turned out the client wasn’t the Queen but Kate Moss, which made his daughter proud instead.

He only created the font style Kate Moss, at first he did do it in capital letters however, due to some further experiment he choose to do lower cap, which allowed him to add the circles and play around with the weight of the word. Later on the two hearts were added, however, it was after he sold the logo design to the company. He had no responsibility of the two hearts.

And yes he did meet Kate whilst creating this.

The Guardian logoAt first the guardian logo was created by the David Human it had the letter ‘the’ in italics and the word ‘guardian’ was in a modern bold font.

Due to it’s style had been used by other font designers in logo design, the guardian company knew they had to do something different about their own font as it’s no longer unique from other newspaper company.

• Paul Barnes job was to use the base design but make something different, and he had done it so successfully that their team won an award : Commercial Type is a joint venture between Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, who have collaborated since 2004 on various typeface projects, most notably the award winning Guardian Egyptian. The company publishes retail fonts developed by Barnes and Schwartz, their staff, and outside collaborators, and also represents the two when they work together on type design projects.

• Following the redesign of The Guardian, the team headed by Mark Porter, including Barnes and Schwartz, was awarded the coveted Black Pencil by the D&AD. The team was also nominated for the Design Museum’s “Designer of the Year” prize. In September 2006, Barnes and Schwartz were named two of the 40 most influential designers under 40 in Wallpaper.

What made the new design work was the correction of spacing between the letters and opacity of the font colouring and it’s colours.

Grave Yard visit

In 1997-2010 the stencil typeface Dala Floda NY & London

Stencil type face has always been rough, bold and used commonly on army delivery items.

Paul went looking around graves stones to find fonts that are very old and he noticed the thin lines in the stencil where lost due to the weather conditions of it being outside, however, the heavy set were still visual.

Paul wanted to create something elegant using stencil font style, which is difficult as the purpose wasn’t for it to be elegant but can be fast sprayed on or to be bold and contrasting, asking be be seen from all distance.

After that he was inspired to do his font styles heavy set in stencil style.

Best place to find old fonts isn’t the museum but the grave yard.

Strange requests

• He created a thin type face in 2012, because he saw how popular it was in fashion magazines and other typography font usage, he made his own one and did it with the word ‘love’ and it was placed in front of a shop as exhibition. A passing group of tourist mistaken the look of the shop title love in neon pink lighting as a sex shop.

• In 2010 for a football club in England Croyle London , they wanted to brighten up their football uniform as it’s based colours is white and the text is black. Sounded easy enough until they requested:

“Make it colourful”

“But keep it white” In the end the solution was to do small tiny colourful plus signs all over the shirt, the client saw the design and liked it but rather then it being on the entire shirt, he only wanted it in one area the sleeves. So at the end, it was barely visible.

• Again, Paul was faced with another sporty client request in designing football shirt

number, the client wanted him to “let’s keep the number simple” so then we were trying heavy weights, style of numbering etc. At the end the football team didn’t win but at least his typography font was shown all over TV. After that it was used again, but most famously it was on Bolt’s Olympic shirt, which Bolt had won and Paul takes part credit in his success due to his designed number.