Behind the Black Star: Jonathan Barnbrook's Stamps talk at the Michigan Theater

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Jonathan Barnbrook

Despite its simple presentation, Jonathan Barnbrook's cover for David Bowie's final album, Blackstar, is full of hidden surprises.

Designing album covers for a legendary musician has its perils and its perks. According to Jonathan Barnbrook, they're sometimes one in the same.

"Can you imagine how scary it is to have David Bowie sitting next to you when you're listening to his album?" the British graphic designer asked the audience at Ann Arbor's Michigan Theater on Thursday, February 9. "He's going, 'What do you think?'"

As the crowd laughed, Barnbrook's tone shifted from comedic to grateful: "It's actually fantastic."

The self-described "non-designer" was in Ann Arbor as part of the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker series. In addition to his collaborations with Bowie, Barnbrook's often-humorous talk covered highlights from his career, including his anti-corporate work with Adbusters magazine in the early '00s, the creation of several well-known fonts, and political and socially minded exhibits and campaigns, including his logo for the Occupy London movement.

Jonathan Barnbrook

Initially, The Next Day album cover was not a heroic effort among design fans.

Barnbrook is probably best known for designing the covers of Bowie's last four albums, including 2013's The Next Day and 2016's ★ (which Barnbrook clarified is not named Blackstar, as it's commonly known), released just before the musician died of cancer last year, and he bookended his hourlong talk with stories about the creative process and the very different public reactions to each.

The divisive The Next Day artwork infamously repurposed the cover of Bowie's 1977 classic Heroes with a big white square covering the singer's face in the iconic black and white portrait. Many critics and fans complained the cover looked slapped together and even accused Barnbrook of trolling them with it.

But Barnbrook explained, and showed the drafts to prove, it took several rounds of revisions and back and forth with Bowie to come up with the simple design that played on the artist's 10-year absence from music at the time and also nodded to Bowie's time in Berlin in the 1970s.

For ★, the artist shared he was partly inspired by a conversation he'd had with a drunken William S. Burroughs while he was in still college. He had asked the famed beat poet and novelist, "What is the future of typography?"

Burroughs replied: "Something between Egyptian hieroglyphs and airport pictograms for the next 10,000 years."

The typefaces and graphics from the artwork -- its fragmented star shapes below the main image star actually spell out "Bowie," Barnbrook noted -- were made free to download for non-commercial use, and fans around the world have used them to pay tribute to the singer, some going as far as to have it tattooed.

Jonathan Barnbrook

A snapshot from Barnbrook's Friendly Fire exhibit in 2007 at London's The Design Museum.

Acknowledging the mostly student crowd, Barnbrook warned that a lot of design work is being asked to lie and "kiss corporate ass." Many of the jobs he and his firm take are in the cultural sector because it "does the least amount of damage."

In 1999, Barnbrook and 25 other designers signed the First Things First 2000 Manifesto, speaking out against some of that damage they saw being done.

"Design suddenly was catching onto globalization and introducing this idea of paying celebrities millions of dollars for endorsements, but the [products are] made in a sweatshop," Barnbrook said."To me, this is a vile, vile way of working."

Barnbrook encouraged the designers in the audience to "be brave" and do the work for which they want to be known and hired for instead of compiling a portfolio they aren't happy with and will be expected to replicate later. He also reminded them that nearly half of the job is getting people to see your work and said young creatives can't expect people to find them.

"You have to write to people you want to work with; you have to be active," he said.


To read about the rest of this season's Penny Stamps series, read our preview, "From Rubik's Cube to Roller Coaster: Penny Stamps Speaker Series, Winter 2017."


Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to Concentrate Ann Arbor.