28th January, 201o
Today I met the man himself, Jonathan Barnbrook!, through the feed night organized by the feed team!
Apologies for the bad quality pics, the flash didn't make a difference whatsoever, need a better camera than to rely on my 8mp phone cam.
So, like I was saying, finally got to meet one of my main interests in the graphic design industry, as I really admire his typographic work, but of course you hear everyone saying things like that so I wont ramble on about how good a graphic designer he is! Plus, he was actually a nice guy, very honest and clear about his work.
He talked about his work, and reasons behind his feelings towards politics. He said, there was a point in his life where he was tired of working for other people, and just wanted to work for himself and I found that very inspiring. He also said, and if I can remember well, that when you produce work that is not what people are used to, that reveals the truth, some companies just wont take it! That need to tell the truth to people comes from him working with Adbusters, where 'a person can be true to him/herself'. Things like naming one of his fonts after a serial killer, raised quite a fuss with people too, but I don't think a bunch of wining people will stop him from expressing himself through his work.
Any-who, I did learn a lot from the dude, and I mean A LOT, its not like you get to meet Barnbrook everyday. An advantage about working in the Feed studio, we got the chance to walk through Birmingham with him, before the feed night started. We looked at Type found around us and how it communicates to others, anyways.. thats what I thought we were doing. Then our little walk ended when we got to St. Chads Cathedral, the place was beautiful, filled with history.
These are some of the images that made it through all that blur and movement and bad lighting, and these are some interesting ones too, which I very much like. I particularly love the last two images, with the type going in a curve with the architecture, its quite beautiful lettering to be honest.
When we got to the cathedral Barnbrook told us that Augustus Pugin, the guy who built the place in 1841, got so 'into' his projects that he worked to every detail, overworking if you want to call it. He did both the interior and exterior of the building, every mark you saw he designed individually. Unfortunately the poor bloke died at 40 because of the dedication and passion for his work. The type in and out of the building had lasted all this time, but parts of some typography had deteriorated, but that had an unusual beauty to it.
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