Just keeping you postered

As part of the 2007 London Design Festival, ‘26 Posters’ set a challenge to twenty-six pairs of writers and designers. To create a six-word poster that somehow comments on or reflects its immediate location. That’s it. Simple, but devilishly tricky. Billboard posters and Street Talks (sponsored telephone boxes) appeared all over London, as well as Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh.

I was honoured to team up with my old friend, the prodigiously talented Jonathan Barnbrook, fresh from his one-man show at the Design Museum. We created a poster for Birmingham’s Gun Quarter, which in the 18th century claimed to be ‘the world’s foremost producer of guns’. Through a tension between words and image, ‘This smoking gun. Made in Birmingham’ intends to pose intriguing contradictions and questions.

You can see the rest of the posters on the 26 web site.