Barnbrook Has Balls

Well what a bizarre past two days my life has been. Surreal at the most.
I'll begin with the, well, beginning.

I found myself fretting about pin-up designs and typeradio layouts at about 10pm. I had overwhelming nerves for having the whole class ready with pristinely foam-boarded displays, whilst I had nothing but a shoddy unpackaged indesign file missing faults and artist statement full of apologies and excuses. Similar to dreaming about going to school on a normal day, to look down and realise you've got no trousers on. For me anyway.

This promptly became mixed and infused with excitement. Jonathan fucking famous Barnbrook is coming to give a talk to us. We went to see he exhibition at the design museum for christ sake. I remember the weak knees at viewing his early college work and lavish vast walls full of glossy politcal piss-take. This dream-like state soon turned to the previous fear as I realised I still hadn't read Matt's copy of the 'Barnbrook Bible'.

Many hours later at 6am, surrounding by mugs of coffee and sugary food, I twitched. Having consumed 250 pages from his book non-stop I was both in awe and sleep-deprivation. I like the lucidity that comes from sleep deprivation. People think you become drone-like but for me, I become more alert. Past the sleepy eyes and yawns I get an energy burst that lasts a few good hours. Blue smarties and cherryade kind of burst. Ultimately, I was happy. Happy with myself for reading such content and sticking at it, and happy that Barnbrook had been so good at making it that it really wasn't that difficult.

Fast forward another seven hours and I sit, still awake from adrenaline, with Jonathan Barnbrook giving a talk on his work. Opening with "Hello, mother fuckers." he knows how to explain his work. It was, what I had read the night before coming from his mouth. A little cruder and personal, but none-the-less a reiteration I actually enjoyed. Afterwards he was kind enough to talk exclusively to everyone on Vis-Comm (which expanded to a full choc-a-bloc room) about being a designer. He ripped several foundations on which the Institute relies on being kept. I found it a welcome and rather refreshing reality fish slap to the face. As it wound down and Jonathan seemed to get a little more tired and anger-fuelled by working himself up about his opinions, sodden as he seemed in his own shy sensibility, I still liked it and felt my time was more than well-dedicated to somebody who gave their well-dedicated (and costly I assume) time to me.

I love his typographic work for it's detail, elegance and originality, and although I'm not too keen on his voice in the later work for it's political stance graphically, I still respect him for having the mammoth size balls it takes to take your career and extreme ethics in the same hand and mesh them together so intricately.

I don't think there will be any Barnbrook's for a long time, and I personally believe this is a good thing.


Long live the legend.