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neville brody
| GRAPHIC DESIGN | a link to his website

Neville Brody is a British designer who was born in Southgate, London on April 23, 1957. He is most famous for graphic and typography work that he did during the 1980s, becoming known for his record cover designs and eventually moving to work on magazines and newspapers. He was one of the founding members of FontShop1 in London and has designed many typefaces for them. Brody also helped to initiate FUSE,2  and continues to put his efforts into it currently, along with working at his own company, Research Studios. Neville Brody is an innovative designer and his reputation of groundbreaking typography continues to influence the world of graphic design.

Southgate, where Brody grew up, is a suburb of North London.  This suburban location gave Brody the opportunity to experience the contrast between the nearby neon lights of London’s West End, and the beautiful and serene Hertfordshire countryside. This locale molded little Neville into a student focused on school from a Fine Art viewpoint at a very early age. “I don’t remember a time in my life when I was going to be doing something else. Ever since I had any self awareness, I’ve wanted to do art or painting.”3 This concentration led Brody to a three-year B.A. course in graphics at the London College of Printing4 during the fall of 1976. His desire was to hone his craft of communication by learning the process behind creating the art that was more personal and less manipulative. The instructors at the London College of Printing were less than impressed with his work, calling it un-commercial, preferring safe economic strategies to experimentation.5

This is the point where I am able to empathize with Neville Brody and his journey through college. I am still very green within the program, but it is interesting to see how far an instructor will let you push before your solution seems too over-the-top to be successful.  The beautiful thing about being in the design program at the University of Kansas is that you are able to push your boundaries as far as they can possibly go as long as you have a strong concept to back you up. The planning and conceptual thinking are included as part of the experimentation and therefore are necessary to create good design.

Brody’s second year at the London College of Printing was met with his love for Punk Rock, which was a major influence on London life during 1977. He began to design with a confidence and motivation that only the energies of Punk could provide. He took a risk and was almost thrown out of the College for putting the Queen’s head sideways on a postage stamp design, but managed to stay in school and get the chance to design posters for student concerts at the LCP.6

Although Brody was highly influenced by the Punk Rock movement, his first year thesis at the LCP was based around a comparison between Dadaism and Pop Art. He described Dadaism as an anti-art, where art manifested itself as an industry without any relevance to the common man, an embracing of the destruction of art. He described Pop Art as a vindication and celebration of the commercialism that developed out of the Fifties, a marketing exercise of modern cultural United States.7 With this comparison made, Brody’s work was influenced by a combination of Dadaism and Punk Rock, along with adoration for the Constructivism of El Lissitsky and photograms done by Man Ray.8 

By the time that Brody was ready to leave school, he was preparing his final-year thesis on magazines which led him to an interview with Al McDowell, a designer who owned a company called Rocking Russian. This thesis eventually brought Brody to his first position as a designer of record covers at Rocking Russian. He spent nine months there, but left because although Russian was very expressive on a creative level, business-wise it was possibly the worst run institution he’d ever been involved with.9 His move led him to working at Stiff Records for a year, but they were an independent label that attempted to conform to the styles of major record labels, something that Brody was not too pleased with. His time at Stiff allowed him to develop connections with a group called 23 Skidoo and Rod Pearce,10 two elements that provided him with work after he was fired from Stiff.

In 1981, Neville Brody became the art director for Fetish Records, an independent label that provided him with total freedom to express himself and continue with the experimentation and consolidation of ideas that he had been working on while at college.11 His intentions while at Fetish were to reintroduce human markings into commercial art, creating violent imagery that represented a reaction to the commercial marketplaces in which the human form had become plastic.12

Brody also did design for a group called Cabaret Voltaire,13 and he had been their chief designer since 1979. He took up designing for Cabaret Voltaire around the same time that Fetish Records was being started, and the theme throughout Cabaret Voltaire’s covers is very similar to that of Fetish Records. “The dominant theme is decay through process, the loss of human identity that results from communication being transmitted through machines that condition human interaction.”14 Brody’s Punk Rock influences had him experimenting with the contradictions of disturbing imagery with a use of lighter color and typography, creating a comparison between fact and belief.

23 Skidoo was another band that Brody designed covers for, and he pushed his designs to extend the two-dimensional plane of record covers further than anything he created for Fetish Records or Cabaret Voltaire. Brody molded three-dimensional objects and photographed them from different angles in hopes of transporting the viewer further by extending the cover’s possibilities. He also chose a logo for 23 Skidoo that became more abstracted with each progressing cover, eventually becoming a sequence of symbols that required recognition without legible letterforms.15 Brody believed that from 1976 to 1982, record covers would influence the way that people think, and now they influence the way that people dress; in other words, in order to reach a large audience, familiarity is key and pushing an idea for an idea’s sake is all but lost.16

In the early 1980s, Brody began designing for The Face magazine and he questioned all parts of the traditional structure of magazine design. “I was wanting to suggest three things. Firstly, how much of a headline do you need to be able to recognize it? Secondly, I wanted to give the idea that with each spread there was an infinite choice, and what we had done was…one small part of that; and lastly, I wanted to use the three-dimensional space of a magazine.”17 Brody developed a grid based upon a simple system that was easily adapted when necessary. His art direction changed the magazine from a local newspaper that was created to appeal to the people that it wanted to write about, to a “style bible” that the general public worshipped on a weekly basis. Brody’s intentions were not to create a mainstream magazine, but his design became another set of ground rules for a new generation of designers. “There were times when my work had been ripped off so much that I didn’t want to make any new statement on the page whatsoever. I wanted other people to challenge The Face, not to copy it.”18 Brody’s work done with The Face was incredibly influential on not only the design world, but the entire public perspective as well, and his experimental style had become the norm for the 1980s.

From the spring of 1983 to 1987, Neville Brody worked with City Limits, a magazine that had started as a breakaway from a weekly London guide known as Time Out, which had become its major competitor. When Brody arrived at City Limits, they weren’t selling many magazines and were very reluctant and resistant to any sort of change. Brody soon convinced the magazine that change was a necessity in order for survival. “I changed the type from bold condensed to a mixture of Gill and Garamond, which shifted the feel away from newsprint and brought it closer to a magazine style. We got better-quality paper for the cover, moved the features to the front and back, and created a new section in the center of the magazine as a listing supplement.”19 Advertising increased, editorial content improved, and the magazine’s sales went up by 50%. Sadly, the magazine lacked any real art direction and the design fell apart within a year. Brody came back a provided a second re-design that provided a rhythm and sense of depth among feature material, news material and listings, and it was a complete success.20

Arena was launched in 1986 by the same publishers as The Face and was meant to have the appeal of a magazine for readers who had outgrown The Face, as well as the appeal of a men’s magazine, as England had none on the market during the 1980s. Brody concentrated on the overall art direction of the magazine which in turn dictates the design, and not vice-versa. He adopted a straight-forward, informational approach, using Helvetica for headlines and hand-drawing a typeface used only on section headings (to help carry the identity of the magazine). “I did not believe that people would discover things in the design worth ripping off, but they have. What else can be said about Arena? It really should speak for itself.”21

Neville Brody gave himself the status of a design icon during the 1980s, but he seemed to be frustrated by the new designers who would use his experimental styles as their new methods. There were several times in Wozencroft’s book when Brody would talk about people “ripping [him] off” and I became very confused.  Brody is obviously the creator of the experimental, “Punk Rock,” contrasted style which so many designers after him worked to procure; I would have to say that he should feel secure and proud to be the inspiration for so many people within his occupation. Isn’t there an old saying that goes: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?” Brody’s design career in the 1980’s helped him to turn heads, change rules, and publish one of the best selling design books in the world, which I just so happened to cite his entire 1980s bio from.

Into the 1990s, there was still no stopping Brody.  In 1994, he opened the very first Research Studios in London with his business partner, Fwa Richards. After the success of the London studio, other studios opened in Paris and Berlin, and there are plans to open a New York studio.  Research Studios clientele run the gamut, from web media to print, and from environmental and retail design to moving graphics and film titles. Research Studios also has a sister company, Research Publishing, which produces and publishes experimental multi-media works by young artists. Its highest priority is FUSE, which is approaching its 20th issue over a publishing period of ten years. Three FUSE conferences have been held in London, San Francisco, and Berlin, and they have brought together speakers from design, architecture, sound, film, interactive design, and web design.22 FUSE is Brody’s interactive journal on experimental type, and his attempt to “liberate typography from its textual role.” He uses the journal to explore other layers of communication within typography the same way a painter explores abstract forms without having to represent reality.23 This approach stems from a decision that Brody made very early in his life, choosing Graphics over Fine Arts because he thought: “Why can’t you take a painterly approach within the printed medium?”24

Neville Brody was officially the best known British Graphic Designer of his generation during the 1980s, and he continues to be an innovative force to be reckoned with.  He has designed dozens of typefaces, Insigina, Arcadia, and Typeface Six are three of his most popular, and Blur is his self-proclaimed favorite “because it has to do with our experience in the information society today that I managed to translate into a process font.”25  Brody uses the Mac as a tool to translate any medium he desires, his most recent project being to create a new look for the vintage champagne brand, Dom Perignon.  Even with the Mac being a universal tool that any designer can learn Brody stands as an trendsetter. “Often people forget that how clever you are with the latest technology is not the point. The true challenge is what messages are you putting over? How do you want people to feel about the work you’re doing? It’s a dialogue. It’s never a monologue. Wherever possible, we’ve consciously tried to make sure that visual communication is an open-ended process.”26 Neville Brody is a phenomenal designer with creativity that is admired and envied within the world of computer-based design, and he shows no sign of slowing his quest to push the envelope at anytime in the near future.

ENDNOTES

1FontShop is the original font reseller in digital type history.  There are six independent FontShops (licensers of the FontShop concept) in Europe, Australia, and the USA.  FSI produces the FontFont typeface library and publishes FontBook, widely considered the most comprehensive printed reference on digital typefaces. See “FontShop.” Wikipedia.com. 2007. Online Encyclopedia. 15 Mar 2007. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FontShop>

2FUSE is an influential fusion between a magazine, graphics design and typeface design. Each pack includes a publication with articles relating to typography and surrounding subjects, four brand new fonts that are unique and revolutionary in some shape or form and four posters designed by the type designer usually using little more than their included font. See “Brody, Neville.” Wikipedia.com. 2007. Online Encyclopedia. 15 Mar 2007. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Brody>

3 A quote from Neville Brody. Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):5

4It was rumored that the college turned out people who could hand-draw a page of text so that it looked as if it had been printed by a machine. See Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):5

5Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):5

6His poster designs would eventually lead him to meet a group called Cabaret Voltaire, with whom he did many album covers. See Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):6

7Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):6

8Man Ray’s poetic photographic forms and wrapped objects hold, in their surrealist language, many of the keys to modern-day advertising’s manipulative techniques – though with none of the beauty of the original. See Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):6

9Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):9

10Rod Pearce was a contact of the band 23 Skidoo and was setting up Fetish Records during the time that he met Neville Brody. See Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):9

11Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):52

12Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):56

13A punk group started in 1973, Cabaret Voltaire’s main intention was to upset people in any way possible, to infuriate them, and to stimulate them. See Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):59

14A quote from Neville Brody. See Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):60

15Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):80-82

16Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):74

17A quote from Neville Brody. See Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):96

18A quote from Neville Brody. See Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):102-106

19A quote from Neville Brody. See Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):133-136

20Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):137

21Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):140

22See “Neville Brody-Biography.” ResearchStudios.com. 2003. 23 Mar 2007. <http://www.researchstudios.com/home/006-neville-brody/NEVILLE_home.php>

23See Gibson, Barbara. “Neville Brody: Inventing a Graphic Language” Apple Pro Profiles. 2007. 23 Mar 2007.    <http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/brody/ >

24A quote from Neville Brody. See Jon Wozencroft. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Universe Publishing 2001):5

25A quote from Neville Brody. 23See Gibson, Barbara. “Neville Brody: Inventing a Graphic Language” Apple Pro Profiles. 2007. 23 Mar 2007.    < http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/brody/ >

26A quote from Neville Brody. 23See Gibson, Barbara. “Neville Brody: Inventing a Graphic Language” Apple Pro Profiles. 2007. 23 Mar 2007.    < http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/brody/ >

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blackwell, Lewis. 20th-Century Type.  Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2004.

“Brody, Neville.” Wikipedia.com. 2007. Online Encyclopedia. 15 Mar 2007. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Brody>

“FontShop.” Wikipedia.com. 2007. Online Encyclopedia. 15 Mar 2007. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FontShop>

Gibson, Barbara. “Neville Brody: Inventing a Graphic Language.” Apple Pro Profiles. 2007. 23 Mar 2007. <http://www/apple.com/pro/profiles/brody>

“Neville Brody-Biography.” ResearchStudios.com. 2003. 23 Mar 2007. <http://www.researchstudios.com/home/006-neville-brody/NEVILLE_home.php>

Wozencroft, Jon. The Graphic Language of Neville Brody. New York: Universe Publishing, 2001.