Park House

The design of Park House
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1. Park House designed by Apt for Land Securities (photo © Andrew Beasley)

Letters made from engineered lines inspired by art and architecture.

Park House is a mixed-use building on the edge of Mayfair with an Oxford Street frontage. Asked to “bring some soul into the building,” sculptor Walter Bailey made ‘Fragments From the Web’ which is the overall title for the sculpture and design elements he created for Park House [fig 1].

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2. Sculptural work in oak by Walter Bailey is placed at the entrance to Park House

The sculptural work is organic and sinuous, which contrasts with and enhances the engineered structure of the building [figs 2, 3, 4]. Design company NB Studio developed the identity and marketing material for the development. Part of their work also involved the design of a display typeface, inspired by Bailey’s sculptural work and the building’s structure [fig 5].

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3. Decorative panel in situ on the Park House exterior

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4. The decorative artwork runs between the structural ribs

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5. Initial letter shapes by NB Studio

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6. Setting up the basic geometric elements to allow for the various sizes of circles required by different letter proportions

We took the basic letter shapes created by NB Studio and reworked them to better fit the geometry required by digital type design [fig 6]. This allowed for the evening up of the line weight and consistency of the parallel lines. During the process we changed many of the letters to solve problems of proportion as well as developing new letters shapes that increased the idea of wrapped and overlapping lines [figs 7, 8].

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7. Our initial k, a second version and the final letter shape

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8. Different designs of s

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Typeface details

Park House is a single font with 83 glyphs

Completed 2008