The Barbican is one of London's most iconic arts venues, home to a year-round programme of theatre, music, cinema and visual art. Its partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company brings some of the UK's most ambitious theatrical productions to London.
Working as lead designer on the RSC's 2025 Barbican season, the challenge was a familiar one in theatre advertising: highly detailed, visually busy artwork that still needs to land clearly at scale.
The solution was a clean, typographic-led approach that stripped back everything competing with the artwork, giving the production titles, directors and authors room to breathe. Rather than designing around the imagery, the system was built to let it remain the hero with typography doing the structural work underneath.
A consistent, confident visual presence across London and the Barbican throughout the 2025 season, delivered on time across a high volume of formats for two concurrent productions. The typographic approach proved robust enough to work across every spec in the campaign without adaptation.
