This Saturday, Jonathan will be mixing live visuals during a performance by electronic music pioneer John Foxx at the Roundhouse in Camden, London. To whet your appetite for the performance, we have posted a couple of VJ clips on our Vimeo site.

The first clip, for the song This City re-appropriates archive documentary footage and mixes it with fake film titles of the track name and lyrics, referring back to the evocative, cinematic work that was done for the DNA DVD.

You can view the clip on Vimeo here.

The second VJ clip is for the song Burning Car, and features experimental particle typography created in Processing.

You can view the VJ clip in Vimeo here.

For more information on the Roundhouse gig and to buy tickets, visit the Roundhouse website.

What with all the excitement of the Sydney Biennale, we had neglected to post some images of our work for the Hills Spring festival at Roppongi Hills.

We created three banner designs (pink, orange, blue) which were displayed around Roppongi Hills during Hills Spring. The festival, which takes place during the blooming of Sakura, includes illuminations, food markets, live music performances and a special opening of the Roppongi Hills Rooftop Garden.

The blooming of Sakura is a very special time in Tokyo and all over Japan, with many people enjoying Hanami — or flower viewing — parties.

We wanted the design of our banners to reflect the special significance of Japanese springtime, so we took inspiration from Japanese Mon — circular heraldic crests which were used to identify individuals and families.

In contrast to the historic reference material, we employed a bright colour palate and created some custom typography to emphasise the contemporary attitude of Roppongi Hills.

As well as the banner designs, we created two logos; one for the festival for the Roppongi Hills Spring Festival and one for Ark Hills Sakura Festival which again combined historic Japanese influences with a pop sensibility.

We are pleased to announce our involvement in the forthcoming John Foxx DVD and CD release, DNA. Jonathan has created two short films for the DVD, which features unique collaborations between John Foxx and some of his favourite film-makers. The two films that have been included are A Half-Remembered Sentence From The Quiet Man and Clicktrack.

The animation for A Half-Remembered Sentence From The Quiet Man takes one sentence from Foxx’s written work The Quiet Man and illustrates it with a dreamlike quality reminiscent of the nature of the text and the main characters approach to the idea of the city. Jonathan created a special elongated version for DNA, you can view a shorter version here.

The animation for Clicktrack uses analogue sound archive tape from John Foxx’s pioneering electronic album Metamatic. The sounds were left unedited with all gaps and hisses left in. You can view the animation here.

As well as creating two animations for the DVD, we were also responsible for the packaging design. The design draws inspiration from the elaborate title sequences of early twentieth century cinema, whilst evoking the black-and-white stylistic expressionism of Film noir.

You can read more information on the John Foxx website, and you can pre-order the DNA here

Situated in the heart of Sydney, in a country that has traditionally regarded distance as a disadvantage, this Biennale will celebrate distance by including art from all over the world.

Drawing inspiration from the work of Harry Smith, Barnbrook has created a unique identity that communicates the eclectic, multifaceted ideas that inform the concepts behind the Australia’s largest contemporary art festival.

More soon.

* The festival opens in 2 days time.

Barnbrook are very pleased to announce the forthcoming release of a book which we have written, edited and designed: The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts. Published by a new publishing house – Fiell – TLBSGF is a powerful visual manifesto highlighting the inequalities of rampant globalisation.

Charlotte and Peter Fiell – two writers for whom we have much admiration – have launched their publishing house with an aim to “to offer the highest quality, most broadly appealing and best value books anywhere.” We are very pleased to be a part of their inaugural book launch, and grateful for the degree of creative freedom we were offered.

Compiling and designing this book was a wonderful opportunity to have complete control over content but also brought us many challenges and tough decisions. Our intention was to create a thought provoking and visually exiting book, which can be returned to again and again. It was also important for us to avoid any visual clichés and give equal weight to a broad range of subjects. To do this we took the theme of interconnectivity and the idea that statistics cannot be looked at in isolation – they are always part of a bigger picture. The book is structured so that each of the eight chapters directly relate to the preceding and succeeding chapter, and each fact relates in some way to the preceding and succeeding fact. Some facts are also connected to other parts of the book by a series of nodes and links which allow the reader to navigate in a non-linear fashion, similar to that of the internet.

The eight chapters – trade, environment, health, population, human rights, arms trade, war, illicit drugs – gave us such a range of content that we thought it unsuitable to stick with one visual style. With an emphasis on bold, colourful layout, we used a mix of typographic illustration, information graphics and photography. You can view a selection of spreads on the Barnbrook home page, and see some more photographs of the book further into the Barnbrook site.

TLBSGF is published in three languages – English, French and German – and should be arriving in book shops in just over a month. You can order the book at Amazon, or visit the Fiell website for more information.

We have just received these pictures of one of our latest projects being printed. The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts – published by Fiell publishing – combines startling graphic imagery with shocking facts gathered from the around the world. We will be showcasing more images of the book as soon as we get our hands on a copy, but before that you can see a couple of spreads on the Design Week blog. The book will be available in three languages and is available for pre-order at Amazon.

Spring is a very special time time in Japan, coinciding with the blooming of Sakura across the country. This year Roppongi Hills commissioned Barnbrook to create an identity for the Hills Spring festival. The identity is made up of a series of logos featuring a Sakura flower and will be rolled out accross publicity for Roppongi Hills and Ark Hills later this month. We also created a series of banners which will be displayed around Roppongi Hills. We will be showcasing more of this project once it has been launched in Tokyo.

We were recently approached by Other Criteria (Damien Hirst’s publishing company) to design a T-shirt. We took the title of Other Criteria and transformed it into Occult Chemistry, creating an image of Anu. The ultimate physical atom or Anu was considered by Occult Chemists to be the fundamental unit of the physical universe. Occult Chemistry was a movement of clairvoyant scientists who visualised atomic compounds using their third eye.

“The Anu can scarcely be said to be a “thing” though it is the material out of which all things physical are composed. It is formed by the flow of the life force and vanishes with its ebb. The life-force is known to Theosophists as Fohat, the force of which all the physical plane forces are differentiations. When this force arises in “space” that is when Fohat “digs holes in space” – the apparent void which must be filled with substance of some kind, of inconceivable tenuity – Anu appear: if this be artificially stopped for a single Anu, the Anu disappears: there is nothing left. Presumably, were that flow checked but for an instant, the whole physical world would vanish as a cloud melts away in the empyrean. It is only the persistence of that flow (the first life-wave, the work of the third Logos) which maintains the physical basis of the universe.”

—Occult Chemistry: Investigations by Clairvoyant Magnification into the Structure of the Atoms of the Periodic Table and Some Compounds
—C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant, 1908

The T-shirt – which is printed in Phosphorescent ink – is now available for purchase on the Other Criteria Website.

Earlier this year Barnbrook designed some banners and a tapestry for the Hills Café/Space, in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo. We thought that this was an opportune moment to showcase the identity we created for the cafe back in 2008.

The identity comprises of a logo created from a customised version of our typeface, Priori Sans, and a series of circular patterns which can be found on banners and advertising.

We also came across this lovely photo of our work on a light-box wall on flickr which beautifully shows our designs.

Below you can see the large ‘tapestry’ that we created, which is displayed within the cafe.

You can find more information on Hills Café/Space on the Roppongi Hills website, also designed by us.

As we begin 2010 Barnbrook would like to announce a radically updated barnbrook.net. The new site gives a summary of some of our recent work and best projects, rather than the entire archive. But don’t fret, if you are a student you can find all the old student resources on the archived site (just head for the about section).