The Occupied Times of London
The Occupied Times of London is among Design Museum’s nominations for Designs of the Year 2013. Congratulations!
The first issue of the OT came out on the 24th of October [2011], just nine days after the occupation began with a print run of 2000 copies of 12 A4 pages. For the first six weeks the paper was produced weekly out of a tent by a small but dedicated team. The OT quickly settled as an A3, broadsheet-sized newspaper and gradually increased in pages until finally becoming a monthly publication of 24 pages after six months.
[The newspaper] is designed by Lazaros Kakoulidis and Tzortzis Rallis who used Barnbrook’s VirusFonts typeface, Bastard, for the large intro caps to features and PF DIN Mono, designed by Panos Vassiliou of Athens-based foundry Parachute, as the main body copy face.
The former, provocative in its charged references to Blackletter; the latter the accepted typeface of many mainstream corporations, businesses and banks. Sitting the two together – in fact, placing single letters set in Bastard ‘within’ the DIN typeface for headlines – chimed cleverly with the ‘occupying’ metaphor. But there was another point to make, says Rallis. “Brands are now using the visual language of protest themselves, with stencils etc, to promote their products – they stole that language – so we are stealing theirs.” […]
[U]sing Bastard came with its reservations, however, from both journalists working on the paper and some of its readers. “But Jon [Barnbrook] volunteered to come in and talk to the journalists about why the typeface was appropriate to the project” […]
We think it is a rather apt choice of typeface, considering the ideology of the typeface: the reinterpretation of blackletter semiotics and insinuation that multinational corporations are akin to the new fascists.
