Abstract

Eric Gill and Jonathan Barnbrook are recognized in the graphic design canon as accomplished and inventive typographers, sharing a country of origin and similar influences, albeit at opposite ends of the Twentieth Century. Yet they both advanced their personal ideologies through the strategy of self-authorship, and perhaps will be best remembered because of this.

This paper examines the confluence in thought and action between the two designers in both their creative production, and in their world views – views on religion, society, economics and morality expounded on through numerous self-published books, essays, interviews, web sites, and of course, their graphic designs.

Does the phrase ‘feeling of spontaneous religious ecstasy’ (Barnbrook, 1999) describe the life’s work of artist, typographer, designer and stone mason Eric Gill? After all, he was a man of dichotomies: iconoclastic and spiritual, erotic and intellectual, modernist and medievalist? Perhaps it does. Yet, it was written by another Englishman, contemporary typographer and designer Jonathan Barnbrook, and originally published on his Virus website in 1999. Ostensibly, the quote had nothing to do with Eric Gill, and yet, as I propose to show, many parallels can be drawn between the two men. In the same provocative, self-aware, and awkward manner towards using self-authored works to advance his ideologies about life and design, Jonathan Barnbrook has much in common with Eric Gill.

To start, I will provide a brief biography of both designers, and also explain the general ideas behind the term self-authored graphic design. (1)

Authorship in graphic design can briefly summed up as the quality and quantity of agency that designers invest into their work. Shifting from neutral information conveyance typical in the client-message-market model, designers-as-authors involve themselves with the message’s content – its meaning, not just its form. Manifestation of authorship can be visual, but involvement with the text has been a defining factor in its emergence. Engagement with the means of production and distribution have also helped advance the cause of authorship in graphic design.

Selecting which clients to work with, initiating projects based on relevance to one’s world views, identification with a particular sub-culture – there many ways that authorship can contribute to a more holistic communication between sender, creator and receiver. Alternative models that designers might employ include advocacy for particular social, political and cultural causes; doing design as a type of personal expression or therapy; collaborating with other writers, artists, editors and publishers; and seeking entrepreneurial opportunities to have a degree of economic independence.

Both Eric Gill and Jonathan Barnbrook are designers-as-authors, in varying degrees, in varying contexts, and at opposite ends of the Twentieth Century. They engaged their graphic works with not only a personal vocabulary – their style – but also used their designs, prints, drawings, typefaces, sculptures, films, lectures, books and interviews to put forth their views and philosophies. In this thay are not alone over the century: think of the design, writing and self-initiated ventures of Jan Tschichold, Alexi Brodovitch, Paul Rand, Push Pin Studio and Octavo. Some of Barnbrook’s contemporaries include: Anne Burdick, Jeffrey Keedy, Teal Triggs, Kali Nikitas, Rick Valicenti, Johanna Drucker, Emigre’s Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzanna Licko, and Design Writing Research’s Ellen Lupton and J. Abbot Miller.

Eric Gill, a multi-talented artist, designer and writer whose working life spanned the first four decades of the Twentieth Century, is best known today by most graphic designers for his humanist sans serif typeface Gill Sans. It was commissioned by Stanley Morison for the Monotype Company in 1927, and developed over several years with the addition of various weights and widths (2). Its success can partly be attributed to the widely quoted crystal goblet author Beatrice Warde (1968), Monotype’s publicity person and one of Gill’s many female companions, who championed the type as having ’dignity and clarity’. (p. 25)

However, Gill designed numerous other typefaces, such as Perpetua, a classically proportioned serif typeface that shows its influence from Roman capitals, and Joanna, a face with delicate slab serifs created for his own printing company, Hague and Gill. Trained originally as an architect, he also studied stone carving at the Chichester Technical and Art School, and eventually calligraphy and lettering under Edward Johnston at Central School of Art and Design in London. It was Johnston’s iconic sans serif typeface that he designed for the London Underground Railway in 1916 that inspired Gill to create his own sans, which was eventually used by the London and North Eastern Railway.

Born in 1882 in Brighton, England, Gill was an eclectic fellow by all accounts. He lived a modest, Bohemian lifestyle, moving his family and entourage (inclusive of dogs, cats, goats and geese) from bourgeois town to monastic commune to rural studio. Gill converted to Catholicism – on his 31st birthday – having been disillusioned with his father’s vicarage at the Church of England (Gill, 1940). ‘I invented the Roman Catholic Church’ (p. 190) he stated; yet as audacious as this remark seems, it gave Gill license to arrive at a personal reconciliation between his spiritual devotion and his frequent transgressions into behavior that the Church deems as sinful, and society unacceptable: adultery, bestiality and incest.

The commissions Gill received during his life include creating woodblock illustrations for The Four Gospels published by the Golden Cockerel Press, carving the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathederal, designing and carving a huge relief panel for the League of Nations building in Geneva, and creating various works for his patron, Count Harry Kessler. Gill also kept detailed journals, wrote and published extensively, and drew the figure endlessly: his family members, his mistresses, his friends, himself. Books that Gill wrote include: Art-Nonsense (1929), An Essay on Typography (1931), Money and Morals (1934), Trousers and the Most Precious Ornament (1937) and at least a dozen others, with his Autobiography published a month after his death in 1940. Numerous books have been written about Gill, and his works and papers are in major world-wide collections. Recent interest in the works of Eric Gill is in evidence: an exhibition, Primitive Types: From Sir John Soane to Eric Gill held at the St. Bride Printing Library in London, and a conference titled Eric Gill & the Guild of St. Dominic (Gill’s printing imprint) held at the University of Notre Dame in Fall 2000. Numerous works of Gill are exhibited frequently in museums and libraries.

Jonathan Barnbrook is regarded today as a leading graphic designer and typographer, and through interviews and personal projects, as a provocateur and design critic. He was born in 1966, near London, and attended Central St. Martins and the Royal College of Art, earning a master’s degree at the RCA. Barnbrooks’ current design practice is a mixture of commissioned work, entreprenuerial projects, and collaborations – most notably with British artist Damien Hirst.

His primary recognition comes from the design of several typefaces that have achieved both popular usage and critical acclaim, and the ensuing debate about his typeface-naming strategies. Besides typography, Barnbrook designs books, posters, and corporate television advertising, although he has expressed ambivalence about the inherent contradiction of the latter in respect to his current anti-corporate position. His design practice has designed the books Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I am Iman (about the supermodel), and Hirst’s infamous I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now. His work has been in numerous exhibitions, published in highly competitive graphic design annuals, and in critical venues such as Emigre, Eye and Typography Now. Barnbrook has been a vocal advocate of contemporary typography and design for the past decade, lecturing world-wide: the American Institute of Graphic Arts Voice 2 conference, the Icograda conference, ATypI annual conference and many others. He is a signatory to the hotly debated First Things First 2000 manifesto, and is a frequent contributor to Adbusters magazine.

Barnbrook has been widely written about, interviewed, and through his VirusFonts.com web site, has published his thoughts on issues ranging from graphic design to capitalism to society. Barnbrook says he is ‘not a fan of organised religion’ (Earls, 2002), yet his approach to spiritual issues is intentionally enigmatic: he once spoke at a typography conference wearing a priest’s clerical collar. (Kaye, 2002) Barnbook’s studio in London’s Soho is ‘complete with seedy sex shops viewed from the window’ (Richardson, 2001), but there is no evidence that Barnbrook shares Gill’s prodigious libido.

The confluences in thought and action between Eric Gill and Jonathan Barnbrook, albeit almost a century apart, are striking. Although manifest in different ways, the tension between spiritual issues and carnal appeal creates an obvious departure point. Gill’s conflicts in his personal life and work, and his resolution or justification of those conflicts, are quintessentially linked to early Twentieth Century modernity and its industrial, economic and social structure on the heels of Victorian England. Barnbrook is of his milieu: post-modern, deconstructed, technological, and yet as Gill, concerned with craft, creative and economic independence of the artisan, and historic references and their contemporary interpretation. As he said in an interview in Eye, ‘I still agree with the socialist side of Modernism’. (Poynor, 1994, p. 14)

In the way that Gill was attracted to the flesh – recording his myriad sexual affairs, drawing his own genitals, and interpreting the spirit and body as one (MacCarthy, 1989) – Barnbrook’s themes of bodily fluids and bodily functions are constant in his work. The typeface Manson, named after the mass murderer Charles Manson (Barnbrook, 1992) and later changed to Mason for distribution by Emigre, caused much debate about the relationship between the name of a typeface and its meaning. It is ironic here in its reference to stone-cutting, and yet stone-cut letters were very much part of Barnbrook’s typographic influence (Poynor & Booth-Clibborn, 1991). Spindly Bastard (an extremely condensed neo-textura face, and its companion Fat Bastard), Prozac, Exocet (named after the French-made missle), Coma, Expletive, Apocalypso, Drone, Nixon – images of blood, flesh, nerves, medicine, chemicals and weapons infuse Barnbrook’s type with a charged rhetorical position. He states: ‘naming a typeface is incredibly important because it is a chance to link the poetry of letterforms with the poetry of abstract shapes with the poetry of language’. (Trudu, undated)

Barnbrook’s VirusFonts.com web site – a commercial venture for marketing his own typefaces similar to Gill’s self-published efforts – is styled ‘like a religious cult’ (Earls, 2002), adding a tongue-in-cheek pop spirituality to his uneasiness with selling his work. In one section of the site, viewers are invited to donate money. For $10,000 donors: ‘A special sin allowance voucher - redeemable when you want to do something such as commit adultery or embezzle your business funds.’ (Barnbrook, 2002, Virus site)

Analogous to Gill’s central positioning of Catholicism as his reason to sculpt, draw, write, and create letterforms that were ‘absolutely legible-to-the-last degree’ (Yorke, 1981, p. 258), Barnbrook literally positions Christianity’s strongest symbol, the cross, as central to his type and graphic designs. Not necessarily a crucifix, the cross shape is evident in Barnbrook’s page compositions, and by his own admission, he begins many of his type font designs by creating the T first. Sometimes resembling a teutonic Iron Cross, sometimes a plus sign, sometimes a Chi-Rho symbol, and sometimes angled like the letter X, Barnbrook seems to use the cross much like crosshairs on a gun-sight, often within a circle. Gill also vacillated between using the T alphabetically and figuratively. In some carvings and illustrations, he would cut off the top of the crucifix and have Christ nailed to a large T; elsewhere, a T would serve as an initial cap and a cross simultaneously.

Gill’s advocation of ragged-right text to avoid compromising his typography’s readability, and his despise for machine-made ornament, mirrors Barnbrook’s contempt for computer distortion and blind reliance on software’s typographic defaults.

As with Gill, one of Barnbrook’s admitted typographic influences was Edward Johnston, and Manson Sans bears an especially strong structural resemblance to Johnston’s London Underground Railway face, and of course to Gill Sans. Gill criticized Johnston’s letters’ details, that they weren’t quite ‘patient of dialectical exposition’ (Gill, 1931, p. 46), whereas Gill wanted Gill Sans to be machine-reproducible. This comes full circle in Barnbrook’s disappointment that his Manson, due perhaps to cultural association with its name as well as its aesthetic properties, was embraced by the so-called Gothic musical and fashion subculture.

Both Gill and Barnbrook seem to enjoy the titillation of provocative written and oral language, as they also revel in the power of visual imagery to shock viewers. Gill bemoans ‘a bastard aesthetic… employed by men of commerce’ (Gill, 1931, p. 68), while Barnbrook laments ‘the fact that too many designers are constantly kissing corporate ass’. (Barnbrook, 2002, Icograda site) Gill referred to his ultra-bold weight of Gill Sans as Double Elefans, with one critic interpreting this a criticism against well-fed bankers. (Warde, 1968) Barnbrook adopts a more direct assault, using a promotional poster for his Fat and Spindly Bastard typefaces to exclaim, ‘to be used by corporate fascists everywhere’. (Barnbrook, 2002, Virus site)

In 1910 Gill worked on the lettering of Oscar Wilde’s monumental gravestone; in 2000 Barnbrook designed posters and other materials for an exhibition titled Oscar Wilde and the Art of His Time held at London’s Barbican Centre. This appears to be a coincidence, or perhaps it’s another connective thread between the works of Gill and Barnbrook.

In conclusion, I have made apparent the many similarities between the work of Eric Gill and Jonathan Barnbrook. The obvious similarities are in the typographic designs; the less obvious, and worthy of additional study, are their world views and how they both used the strategy of self-authorship to advance their philosophies. In Gill, the aspect of design authorship (coupled with his unorthodox lifestyle) differentiated him from his peers to the point of being a freakish iconoclast. Barnbrook embodies the spirit of his times, and represents the diffusive nature of self-authored graphic design in contemporary practice, whereby increased agency comes with increased responsibility. (3)