Shock and Awe
A two-face display family drawn from stencil lettering on military hardware, one sourced from the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the other from the Tomahawk cruise missile.
About
Enola Gay takes its letterforms from the nose cone of the B-29 Superfortress bomber used in the 1945 Hiroshima attack, while Tomahawk is derived from fuselage stencilling on the cruise missile deployed in both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq invasion. Barnbrook positions both faces explicitly as a provocation, inviting the design community to examine the ethics of letterform-making in contexts of mass violence. The conceptual weight of the source material is inseparable from how these faces should be used.
Classification
A display family derived directly from military stencil lettering found on aircraft and missiles; the industrial, utilitarian source material places it firmly in the display/stencil category.