February 22, 2021 Reanne Duffy

It’s big. It’s colourful. It’s challenging. Sounds like a job for Brian Totty Signs and Designs - with a little help from Metamark MD5…

 

The pandemic put a crimp in the plans of many, not least those planning events and happenings celebrating the end of the old year and beginning of the new, and of course last Christmas. 

 

Thanks though to the efforts of Brian Totty Signs and Designs, and the work of Paul Slater, also known as ‘Fabric Lenny,’ Barnsley was treated to a spectacle in colour and light that cheered up the view in the Town Centre.

 

Barnsley Council’s arts and events team engaged Slater to conceive and design an art installation as part of their Winter Windowland event. ‘Fabric Lenny’ is an artist who’s not bound by any single medium and so his work will be familiar to aficionados across a range of genre. Most of his ‘starts’ though begin with the drawing. 

 

One of the exhibits in the Winter Windowland event involved Barnsley’s Town Centre new Library@the Lightbox. Paul Slater’s design, entitled ‘Colour Flow’, would overlay the building’s tightly confining geometry with a work that covered the glazed surfaces. The abstracted work softened the divisions between the glazed panels, leading the eye and never fully resolving itself. It’s a static image but looks as though it’s in animated transition. It radiates colour too, at any hour of the day or night.

 

Works such as this don’t just appear on windows, somebody has to make and apply them. The job on this occasion fell to Barnsley based Brian Totty Signs and Designs. Known to its regulars as Totty Signs, the company is responsible for lots of the signage and graphics dotting the man-made landscape in Barnsley and way beyond. It was founded by Brian Totty, an acknowledged expert and practitioner whose feel for type is reflected in all of the company’s output to this day.

 

The brief came to Totty Signs in the form of a design and manufacturing specification. The design was to everyone's liking. The manufacturing specification however needed some input from Totty Signs in order to make the production, installation, and subsequent removal of the art, practical and affordable.

 

The installed graphic would be visible from both inside the library building and from the outside. It would be applied to body-coloured tinted glass. For this reason, and for several others, it was elected to apply the graphics on the exterior aspect of the glazing.

 

The design originally anticipated manufacturing the graphic from discrete coloured elements. To simplify production and installation the council accepted Totty Signs’ recommendation and gave the go-ahead to produce the stunning graphics as a print and applied job.

 

The team at Totty Signs printed its work on Clear Metamark MD5 and laminated the work so encapsulating the meticulously matched colours between two layers of extremely durable digital media. This construction would ensure that the graphics could be appreciated from either side of the glazing and that light transmission would benefit the exterior view at night, and the interior one during the hours of daylight when the building was occupied.

 

Surveying the extent of the job presented its own challenges and ultimately application had a few of its own too. The weather on the day of installation decided it wouldn't cooperate and the Totty Signs’ installation team found itself working in very cold temperatures and at height.

 

Experience wins through though. Despite the low application temperatures the graphics were applied without issues and, even though it's designed to be appreciated from a distance, close examination of Totty Signs’ work reveals flawless application and attention to detail.

 

The finished job is a revelation. Paul Slaters art tells its own story and imparts its own magic in colour so conferring a bit of an occasion in Barnsley town centre at a time when circumstances said it couldn't be done. 

 

Totty Signs’ work too is worth noting. Producing signs and graphics for application to glazed surfaces at this kind of scale isn't a trivial exercise and it's not something that every sign company would care to take on. Challenges presented to Totty Signs though meet with engagement, competence and get it done attitude. And get it done they did.