The majority of the talk focused on his well publicised work with David Bowie. The most interesting of which was for The Next Day, his penultimate studio album. Refreshingly, Barnbrook walked us through some pretty early stage and admittedly poor versions of the cover - playing with the idea of covering and reshaping Bowie's illustrious career and the imagery that it spawned. To see these rough sketches and illustrator documents morph into the incredible end result was a pleasure and gives weight to the theory that time spend on something (6 months) will eventually chisel out good end results.
The attention to detail across the whole project is fantastic. Creating a new Faux Corporate typeface called Doctrine was done to add to the impression that an album is 'another world', something that makes people think in a new way and feel in a new way. I full subscribe to that and feel the concept of taking old Bowie artefacts and turning them on their head nailed the sound of the album.
Jonathan then went on to talk about politics within his work - noting how his studio are extremely careful when taking work, looking at the ethics and political standings of the company. A quick flick through 30 years of his work showed his intense stance against traditional politics and seemingly nothing is produced without thought to this. I admire anybody who lives so closely to their ethics and morals, this is something that never comes out in my work.
Finally, Jonathan talked about his work for Bowie's Blackstar, a project which derived from communication through Emoji, in fact the album name is technically ★. The artwork is best viewed in its' vinyl version, showing the physicality of the format - with cut out star showing the grooves of the work. The bits of star at the bottom of the sleeve spell out BOWIE - as with The Next Day - a new visual language and world was created.
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