Barker Langham are a cultural consultancy, working worldwide to connect people, places, memory and imagination. We created a new visual identity and website in a creative process rooted itself in cross-cultural dialogue.

Read more

We collaborated with Lara Captan—an Arabic type designer and typographer—to build a toolkit of forms from Arabic and Latin alphabets. These interplay in a bilingual logo and visual language that plays out across web, stationery, notebooks, bags, presentation templates and brand guidelines. We support these signature forms with secondary typefaces Px Grotesk and IBM Plex Sans Arabic, each of which echoes the logo’s geometric lines.

The website aligns itself to both the left and right (depending on visitors’ language choice) with navigation placed centrally to celebrate this symmetry. We frame BL’s values and services with pictograms and patterns that transition between each another by disassembling, then reassembling their toolkit parts in ever new ways. Visitors can choose between gallery, list and map views to provide varied search methods and broadly accommodate different cultures (ie Western cultures often prioritise the linear depiction of data). This is reinforced on case study pages where content moves between holistic clusters of images and tables of content as the user scrolls.

Arabic type consultancy from Lara Captan
Intercultural consultancy from Euphemia Franklin
Website built by Archive
Px Grotesk by Optimo
IBM Plex Sans Arabic by Khajag Apelian and Wael Morcos in collaboration with Bold Monday and Mike Abbink