An ode to Ian Barnard.
I didn’t really know that Ian Barnard was very well-known in typography and lettering circles until I saw YouTube’s resident design hyper-pixie use him as a unit of typographic excellence, ie. “that scores ten Ian Barnards.”
Before that, I had heard Ian on the Honest Designers podcast along with Design Cuts founder Tom Ross, Retro Supply Co.’s founder Dustin Lee and the ever-excellent illustrator Lisa Glanz.
What I hadn’t realized until I was several episodes into the podcast was that I already owned quite a few typefaces that Ian had designed and that (more importantly) they were some of my favorite fonts of all time.
In this short article, I will present to you my top three Ian Barnard fonts. Let’s go!
#1 Montebello
To me, Montebello is the perfect summer vacation typeface. It’s easy to just throw it over a whimsical illustration or a photo of the Balearic islands and call it a day. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do too:
Montebello comes in a variety of styles, like Sans, Rounded and Script. There’s even a distressed variant of the Script version called Textured.
#2 Cool Britannia
If you love whimsy, here’s the perfect font for you. Just like Montebello, Cool Britannia is available in both a Sans and a Script version and it also includes some super-cute doodles for your convenience. I’m giving myself five minutes to create a cute birthday card invitation using this font. Wish me luck!
OK. You clearly didn’t wish me luck hard enough but… 5 minutes, dude! My biggest regret are the balloons that look like they are trying to impregnate the whale. The color of the date and the address is also pretty shit. You try doing better in five minutes. What the hell, man?
#3 Simple Things
A nice, typewriterly monospaced font, perfect for nostalgic, emotional designs. Like Cool Britannia, it includes an amazing array of extras in the form of a font file with a ton of cute illustrations.
To showcase this font, here’s a wedding invitation, made using solely the font and its extras:
Pretty cool, right? And fortunately, in this case, any attempts towards impregnation are totally expected and even celebrated! Yay!
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