Concrete poetry, history, and a Scottish wildflower blue collide in Warriors Studio’s brand for BARD

BARD is an award-winning architecture practice that has built its vision on the legacy of Scottish architect, designer, and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and are the only architects entrusted with building on Mackintosh’s oeuvre with their work at Grade A-listed building Windyhill. “BARD’s founder and director, Ruairidh Moir, moved to Glasgow to study architecture due to his love and connection to Mackintosh and his work, where he studied at the University of Strathclyde. Other members of the BARD team studied at both Strathclyde and the Mackintosh School of Architecture (at the Glasgow School of Art),” James Gilchrist, Creative Director at Warriors Studio tells us, highlighting that the threads of the celebrated architect’s impact are felt throughout the team. Glasgow-based graphic design and creative agency Warriors Studio collaborated with BARD to develop a distinctive brand identity, custom typeface, and website, that would aid in securing new commissions for BARD and strike a balance between strategic business objectives and artistic and creative richness. The resulting identity revolves around a typeface created along with Mitchell F Gillies, inspired by Mackintosh and medieval lettering. Bold, graphic, and linear, BARD Type is an expansive set of letters which, through combining “tradition with modernity, analogue with digital and gentle pacing with immediacy,” echoes BARD’s perspective as “future-focused architects, guided by what’s gone before.” With up to eight alternatives for some characters, BARD Type offers endless possibilities for composition and expression. “You can see the medieval pen ‘strokes’ traditionally scribed with hand-drawn calligraphy being reinterpreted as digital ‘strokes’ between two points,” Gilchrist points out. “This combination adds a strangeness which embodies the practice’s artistic, poetic approach. It also adds a genuine originality to the typefaces.”