Street Barber
The strategic premise
Street Barber is the barber shop Elia Forcina opened in Formia in 2022, after more than fifteen years in the trade, and it holds together two worlds that usually stay apart, the energy of street culture and the rigour of a precise technical service.
The first sketches
The work starts on paper, first the mark, then the director’s notebook for the film, where every scene pairs a gesture of the trade with a place on the street.
Development
American street references lead to an ink and pencil storyboard in three chapters, the run, the street inside and the last stop, where every cut ties the place to the trade through shape, colour or sign.
The system
The logo joins the skull with the bandana, the two crossed razors and the Street Barber lettering, with Elia’s signature under the words Barber Shop; around the mark work three typefaces that never swap roles, Gotham for headings, Akzidenz for text and Angel wish for calligraphic accents, on a base of black and paper with a signal red.
Applications
The uniforms carry the lettering on the collar and the logo on the back, and they are the first point of contact with the system; for Instagram the three barbers become three mugshot portraits on a slate, a direct way to introduce the team in the salon’s own language. On the salon wall the logo becomes a mural, a face between the two crossed razors with the gothic lettering on either side.
The film
“Capolinea” runs for 71 seconds and takes the viewer inside the salon over an original 120 BPM trap track, cut scene by scene to the beat, from the run to the last stop.
The outcome
The result is a system that speaks the language of the street and puts it in order, a logo, a manual, a film and a gallery of portraits that say the same thing to those who walk in from the neighbourhood and to those who discover it on a screen.
Let us talk about it, or keep exploring the rest of the work.
