Neville Brody 



       Neville Brody is an internationally known British graphic designer and typographer, who is best known for his work on magazines, most notably
       The Face. This magazine transformed the way in which designers and readers approach typography and layout. In addition to his magazine
       work, he designed record covers for such independent record companies as Fetish, Hannibal, and Phonogram Records in the 1980s. Along with
       his other work, Brody created a vast amount of type faces throughout his career. A few of these types are Arcadia, Industria, and Insignia. Brody
       was born in 1957 and grew up in Southgate, which is a suburb of North London. He commented that he does not remember a time in his life when
       he was planning to do anything other than art or painting. In 1975, Brody attended the Fine Art Foundation Program at Hornsey College of Art.
       The school was extremely conservative and at this time Brody decided to pursue a career in graphics instead of the Fine Arts. He says "why cant
       you take a painterly approach within a printed medium?" In the autumn of 1976, Brody started a three-year BA course in graphics at the London
       College of Printing. Brody says he hated his time there, but that it was necessary to his development as a designer. "I wanted to communicate to as
       many people as possible, but also to make a popular form of art that was more personal and less manipulative. I had to find out more about how
       the process worked. The only way possible was to go to college and learn it," His work was often considered too experimental. At one stage he
       was almost thrown out of the school for putting the Queens head sideways on the design of a postage stamp. "If tutors said they liked something I
       was doing, I would go away and change it, because such approval then made me think there must be something wrong with the work. I think that
       was a very positive and healthy attitude." Brodys attitude on computers has changed a lot since he first started using them. His view had been that
       if you could do something by hand, you should not use a machine. In 1987, Brody forced himself to play around with a friends computer. He says
       learning to use the Macintosh computer was a slow process. But in the end Brody acquired his skills with the mouse by playing a game called
       Crystal Quest for hours, instead of working. He realized all the ways that he could manipulate his work on a computer that he absolutely could not
       have done any other way. Although he still believes that hands on experience is definitely necessary, he realizes that computers open up a whole
       avenue that would not be possible without their development. Dadaism and pop art have largely influenced Brodys work. Although he says he
       never sought to copy these styles, he took from them a sense of dynamism and humanism and a non-acceptance of the traditional rules and values
       of art. These elements can be seen in Brodys typefaces, which are have a very original and expressive design. All along the line, Neville Brody has
       tried to create and use typefaces that go against the grain of contemporary fashion. Others that have influenced Brody are Man Ray and Lazlo
       Maholy-Lazlos photography. Both of these men were able to stretch the limits of their fields, by inventing and manipulating techniques as never
       before. After his graduation, in the late 1970s, Brody began to design record covers for British punk music companies such as Fetish and
       Hannibal. The punk music scene then was more concerned with the ideas behind the music than with the actual music. Brodys outrageous cover
       designs were readily accepted by these companies. Cabaret Voltaire and 23 Skiddo were two bands that he worked extensively for on album
       covers. In 1981, Brody began working for a magazine called The Face.' During this time he questioned the traditional structure of magazine
       design. "Why be inhibited by the edges of the page?"says Brody. His main concerns were to encourage people to have to look twice at a page and
       to make the magazine as visually interesting as possible. Brody worked at The Face until 1986. Brody also worked with City Limits and New
       Socialist,' both 1980s magazines out of London. Brody became well known around the world in 1988, when his biography was published and he
       displayed his work in several large art exhibitions. There was a period between 1987 and 1990, when Brody was working for the magazine
       Arena,' when he designed mostly minimalistic non-decorative typefaces. Brody felt his work had been ripped off too much. As a result of this he
       did not want to make anymore new statements what-so-ever. He began to create simple fonts and avoided creating anything too exotic for a
       period of time. Since 1987 Brody has had his own London studio. He found that overseas clients were more supportive of his work intentions --
       to embrace the potential of the computer and to provide companies with the templates that they wanted from his own studio. Commissions from
       Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Mens Bigi and Parco in Japan, and the opportunity to design postage stamps for the Dutch PTT were
       followed by two major television graphics projects. The transition to working with electronic images was reflected by Brodys involvement with
       digital type. In 1990 he opened FontWorks with a coligue named Stuart Jenson. Neville Brody became the director of FontShop International,
       with whom he launched the experimental type magazine called FUSE. Neville Brody has not only changed the world of typography, but that of
       graphic design as well. His ideas of creating typefaces that are more concerned with being graphically oriented, rather than contemporary or simply
       readable, have affected both typography and graphic design. Bibliography Jon Wozencoft, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, c 1988 by
       Rizzoli International Pub. Inc. Takenobu Igarashi, Designers on Mac, c 1992 by Graphic-sha Pub. Co., Ltd.
       http://www.contrib.com/fuse95/fuse-talk/brody.html 



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