‘Victory’

BY CHRIS CHAPMAN

Chris is an award-winning designer from New Zealand, now based in London. He leads a team of Integrated Designers at ad agency Grey London and is co-owner of Glasshouse Salon.

“The brief was two words: Beautifully Sustainable. The beautiful part was easy — I just had to make my letter, V, nice and big. It is an unusual font to work with in that it was designed to look good printed small. The vast majority of printed words are not much larger than 12pt so this makes sense. But the unique grooves that have been dug out of the characters to make them inky-nomical[TM] mean that what prints out small like a nice regular serif font looks interesting at larger sizes. Communicating the fonts sustainability credentials was more challenging given the nature of the overall poster project — a very similar brief was being given to 25 other designers — I wanted to avoid the usual environmental tropes as far as possible. So I tried to take a slightly different angle: let's make Ryman Eco a part of popular culture — a pink peace sign is a very pop art symbol to me — and once it's popular we are that little bit closer to making peace with our environment, in terms of ink and in terms of all the other little things this project might remind people of.”