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#1 (37) 2006 Anniversary Number
Jonathan Barnbrook.
Typographic peace maker
LenaTravkina
Have you ever had a chance to meet a designer whose ethic is to believe in love and respect for every living thing. Whose conceptual basis of all the
work he does is Humanism, which may sound silly because he is a graphic designer that does commercial work. To whom the most important thing is that in
every action in your life, including design work you do, is to not cause harm to others. Being a creative person is about telling the truth. Designers
forget that they are citizens first and designers second.
Meet Jonathan Barnbrook.
His main specialisation is typography. „It always amazes me,“ he says, „how you can create great beauty with typography, I want to try and create beautiful
work with letterforms. Typography also gives me a chance to express all of the amazing contradictions in language, how when people talk and say ’peace’
they mean war. When they say ’hate’ they mean ’love’. Its an area as complex as the language that it represents. Typography is the manipulation of
letterforms, letter-forms express language, language is the thing we use to communicate between people. Typography therefore is a very powerful tool which
we should use to it fullest extent. Unfortunately we choose not to use it for something meaningful most of the time.“
His studio developed an identity for Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; designed album covers „Heathen“ and „Reality“ for David Bowie and has also completed Damien
Hirst’s major monograph „I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life, Everywhere with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now,“ and has created posters, book
and invites for two of his other major exhibitions: „The Beautiful Afterlife“ in Zurich and „Theories, Methods Models, Approaches, Results and Findings“ in
agosian Gallery, New York.
But Barnbrook wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t have a large part of non-commercial projects. Imperialism in America, war between corporations, dictatorship
in North Korea. He worked as an art director of a major antiglobalist magazine Adbusters.
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