We recently got sent this photograph of a strange robotic being displaying a cryptic message. The image was sent to us by Olaf Arndt, one of the curators who we collaborated with on Embedded Art: Art in the Name of Security. The message displayed by the robot is rendered in a cryptographic typeface which we created specially for the exhibition Embedded Art. You can see it in use on the information counter in the image below:

The robot is an Expo-2000, the creation of German artist collective BBM. It features a ticker display that has been re-engineered to become part of it’s amorphous shell. The robot will be displayed in an exhibition at BMW Welt in Munich for the next twelve months. You can read more about BBM (in German) and see pictures of other robots here.

If you picked up a copy of the Observer on Sunday then you may have seen the work of Love Music Love Food featured in Observer Food Monthly. The exposure for LMLF coincided nicely with a series of concerts celebrating the Teenage Cancer Trust’s 10th birthday at the Royal Albert Hall. There will be an exhibition of the work by LMLF from 22 March to 19 April at the Royal Albert Hall whilst the concerts are taking place.

Last year we devised the identity for the charitable organisation, which works in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust. The project is the brainchild of photographer Patrice de Villiers, who shoots some of Britain’s best-known musicians with their favourite dishes. You can see the photographs which were featured in the Observer here and you can find out more about the organisation here (Please note – we did not design the website).

Not wishing to jump on the bandwagon, but we couldn’t help noticing the use of our typeface Exocet on this one off track frame. We spotted the on the frame on the 14bikeco blog. The project is a collaboration between Fixedgear London, 14bikeco, and the artist d*face.

First up is Sarcastic, found in Tony and Guy’s magazine Essensuals. It looks rather nice don’t you think?

Then we have a couple of Mason found in very different places. The first was found on Tim Burton’s book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy; the second on the amusingly named Oktoberfest beer (brewed in California).

Another old favourite, Exocet finds it’s way on to a Tattoo book and – in a quite different use – some rather nice looking herbal teas.

Finally, we have an elegantly designed sign for the San Francisco American Conservatory Theater’s War Music. Splendid!

Thank you very much to Izzy Way, Jesse Lee Stout and Amelia Nardinelli for sending those in. If you want have any uses of VirusFonts you have seen please email then to us at blog@barnbrook.net.

Mason is one of the studio’s most well known (and most used) typefaces and it is always interesting to see it abroad. Quite often it seems to be used by restaurants, and here is another example seen in the Malá Strana district of Praha (Prague), Czech Republic.

We are always interested to see how other designers are using our typefaces so if you have any examples, you can email them to us at blog@barnbrook.net

Many of you who followed my work will know one of my main inspirations and areas of interest has been memorials and stone-carved lettering. (I even wrote a thesis about them for my BA at Central St. Martins). So every so often I will be publishing interesting examples that I photograph on my travels.

The first one is not the sober piece of classical typography that you may imagine but a rather whimsical one of the painter Patrick Caulfield designed by himself. I do have a slight association with him, his studio used to be on the top floor of the building where our studio is located,  and I would see him tottering up the stairs, red-faced after a long alcoholic lunch. I loved his work but was too shy to tell him.

His gravestone is located in Highgate Cemetery, London, very near where I live. A beautiful place to visit, particularly the older, overgrown part. The memorial’s ironic use of Art Deco style typography and the pragmatic announcement ‘DEAD’ never fails to raise a smile to me as I pass by. It shows how a memorial can work to be a reminder that a whole human life is being celebrated – one that is full of achievement but also of humour and irony.

It came to our attention a while ago, but we have neglected to post in on the blog until now – Priori Serif is being used by University Challenge. The long running and popular quiz show uses it for its titles and scores, appropriately picking up on that particularly English feel of the letterforms.

In the latest episode Girton College, Cambridge beat St George’s, University of London in an excitingly close match. All the action can be seen on the BBC website and iPlayer.

Following on from a previous blog post earlier this month, Film’s Favourite Font?, we recently came across another of our typefaces being used on a Movie poster.

Bourgeois has been spotted by Yves Peters in a recent article on the font feed. Yves writes “The poster for Steven Soderbergh’s latest, The Girlfriend Experience, kicks all kinds of ass. The image treatment is fascinating, with another image invading and violating the girl’s close-?up portrait through a pattern of dots similar to a half-tone pattern. It is reminiscent of the gorgeous androgynous mesh of Louise Rhodes’ and Andy Barlow’s faces inside the CD booklet of What Sound by Lamb.

The square sans used at the bottom of the poster is not Bank Gothic nor its usual replacement FF Oxide, but quite unexpectedly Jonathan Barnbrook’s Bourgeois, an exquisite choice. And that bar code – it possibly relates to the commerce of sex, prostitution being the main theme of the movie – adds that certain je-ne-sais-quoi to the design. Lovely, lovely..”

Thanks Yves!

It’s always interesting to spot another use of one of our fonts. Recently we’ve noticed that the publicity for an upcoming film release Dorian Gray has been featuring Mason. The British film is an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and stars Barn Barnes and Colin Firth, amongst others.

We weren’t responsible for the poster designs for the film, and we were reminded of a similarly styled poster for another film The Golden Compass which also features our Font Mason. If you can think of any more, email us at blog@barnbrook.net.

Mason is available from Emigre.

‘Produced in 1973, “Television Delivers People” is a seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the populace through “entertainments,” for the benefit of those in power-the corporations that mantain and profit from the status quo. Television emerges as little more than a insidious sponsor for the corporate engines of the world’

Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman | Television Delivers People | 1973