It’s interesting for me to see how my work has progressed and I do think if your work is the same at 40 as it is at 20 then you’re not being honest with your soul. My work used to be very complex — in a world of Modernism that I was reacting to. Modernism for me, at that time, was not sleek European airports but the grim local dole office, or the dirty British Rail train station. It didn’t work so I needed to create design that was a proper human response to the world I hoped to create.

Nowadays, however, we are assaulted by thousands of images of different ideologies everyday — and the only way to break through this is with simplicity and clarity. I don’t mean ‹simple› as in ‹legible› — because something simple can still be open to interpretation — but an aesthetic that is very bold and without decoration.

Jonathan Barnbrook.