- ABOUT ME -
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 typefaces throughout his career.A few of these types are Arcadia, Industrial, 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 Programat 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 can’t 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 LondonCollege 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 manypeople 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 thrownout of the school for putting the Queen’s head sideways on the design of a postage stamp. “If tutors said they liked something I was doing, I wouldgo 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.” Brody’s 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 friend’s 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 calledCrystal 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 havedone any other way. Although he still believes that a hand on experience is definitely necessary, he realizes that computers open up a whole avenue thatwould not be possible without their development.
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 ofthe computer and to provide companies with the templates that they wanted from his own studio.
he transition to working with electronic images was reflected by Brody’s involvement with digital type. In 1990 he opened FontWorks with a collogue named Stuart Jenson. Neville Brody became the director of FontShop International, with whom he launched the experimental type magazine called FUSE. Neville Brody has notonly 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.
