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. Other members of the BARD team all studied at 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.”

Mackintosh’s work seamlessly combines elements of structure, geometry, nature, and organic forms, which Warriors Studio aimed to capture with BARD Type and the grid they used. “Within the letterforms,” Gilchrist explains, “each character creates its own space and divides up an area within the grid; just like lines imply walls and division, and the carving out of space in architectural drawings. The ink traps are also architecturally inspired, like gussets between the letter strokes.”

BARD stands for the full Gaelic name of the practice, which is ‘Bailtean Ailteareachd’s Rùm Dànach: Townships, Architecture and The Room of Poetics.’ Moreover, within Celtic cultures, the word ‘bard’ can denote a storyteller, creator, or poet. This dual significance of the name and its cultural role form the foundation for all the decisions and processes involved in designing the identity.

For example, this idea of storytelling is expressed through typographic compositions that draw inspiration from concrete poetry – where type is laid out in vertical, diagonal and curved arrays. “These compositions didn’t make it into the website for practical reasons. However, it will be perfect for signage, spatial installations, publications and merchandise,” says Gilchrist. “The compositions take on artistic or poetic meaning beyond written sentences where the letters are used as graphic objects and shapes to occupy a space as a visual.” Furthermore, the acronym BARD has been explored to generate new meanings and narratives through a collection of collaborative verses, offering insights into the world of the architecture firm.

To anchor BARD’s identity within its geographical roots, an unexpected colour found in the landscapes of the Scottish Islands was incorporated. The bold and saturated ‘Wildflower Blue,’ inspired by defiant Scottish machair wildflowers growing around BARD’s studio on the Isle of Lewis, adds vibrancy and uniqueness to the brand, defying the typical look and feel of architecture firms.

“As a studio,” Gilchrist reflects, “a common theme in our work is combining seemingly disconnected things in the world. I think that’s one of the things that separates good from great design work, from a creative perspective – broad reference points, the weaving of stories together and the translation of history into a contemporary context,” he concludes.

Warriors Studio

BARD