Vic Fieger’s Barney Bubbles Google logo
Hats of to US designer Vic Fieger for amalgamating some of Barney Bubbles’ graphic devices in this Google logo deviation over at deviantART.
Fieger designed the logo ahead of what would be Barney Bubbles’ 68th birthday on July 30.”I might send it to Google in the million-to-one chance they use it,” he says.
Check out Fieger’s range of freeware fonts and his blog Not New York No.
Tags: deviantART, Google, July 30, Not New York No, Vic Fieger
July 10th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
1. Is it okay if I plug Vic Fieger’s website? It’s http://vicfieger.com/.
2. The mention of Barney’s birthday brings up an interesting question: What do you think Barney would be doing today if he had lived?
July 11th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Seeing contemporary work that is inspired by BB always makes me wonder: how might he be using today’s tools and techniques? Or is this simply unknowable because he died right before the new paradigm came in? He was such a good draftsman for a designer–in a field where many can’t really draw that well. How would he have reacted to Illustrator, for example? I wonder if he would have welcomed the modern technology as a creative boon for the commercial work, or if its very existence would have driven him further into other fields like painting.
July 12th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Plug away Mark – we link to Vic’s site as well.
Of course this question comes up a lot and your’s has coincided with rechercher’s…
July 14th, 2010 at 7:52 am
Rechercher/Vic:
We had this discussion at Eye’s event in January.
I confess I find it futile since BB was such a product of his times that it is largely meaningless to consider placing him outside of them, but here goes:
Malcolm Garrett, who knew and worked alongside him, firmly believes Barney would have adapted and survived since his curiosity was boundless and his technical grasp phenomenal.
Another acquaintance, film-maker George Snow, has said on this blog he is sure BB would have embraced digital technology and ultimately the internet.
Yet BB’s death coincided not only with the first real rise in CD sales – evidenced by that year’s uptake of that Dire Straits album – but also the coming of the Mac.
In the book there is talk about how BB was resistant of new technology during post-production of his promos, feeling uncomfortable with then-new edit suites.
This would suggest that he would have followed/retreated to the latter path you mention, into painting and “art”, if you will.
The over-riding message from his death is that at that point personal and creative options and avenues had been exhausted.
Of course it is a great shame that BB wasn’t around for the mid-80s explosion in not only the the US art market, but also British print publishing, product development, packaging, media and design, and in particular the international video boom.
The recognition in Jon Savage’s “Age Of Plunder” post-modernism survey in The Face (January 1983) was cursory, but at least present (though in the piece BB was elbowed aside by the younger Saville, Linder, Garrett, etc).
From such seeds of encouragement I believe his reputation would have grown outside of the cognoscenti and back into the mainstream; consider Ian Dury’s career at this stage. Plunged into the depths commercially and critically but by the end of the decade ID was something of an eminence grise.
With such champions as Neil Spencer eventually moving onto Arena, Neville Brody gaining credibility every which way and Brian Griffin becoming the photographer of the 80s, maybe his time would have come again, in the pages of the national press for example.
As Tom Waits said, like buildings, if you stick around long enough you become respectable…