Neville Brody:
Inventing a Graphic Language
Neville Brody is a world famous graphic designer. No, he’s a typographer. No, he’s a philosopher. He’s an inventor. He’s an explorer. He’s a… It was clear from the beginning that Neville Brody would challenge the conventions of graphic design. He was nearly thrown out of the London College of Printing for designing a postage stamp with Queen Elizabeth’s head turned sideways.
“I liken working on the Mac to Jazz. A pianist doesn't spend time peeking inside the piano.”
Today, Brody has become an international model for the age of computer-based design. With the Mac, he played at the margins of visual language and used it to launch a revolution in typeface design. In one of its largest-ever bows to pop culture, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum hosted an exhibition of Brody’s work in concert with the introduction of his first book, “The Graphic Language of Neville Brody.”
Playing the Mac
“I liken working on the Mac to jazz,” Brody explains from his London flat. “To play jazz properly, you have to become highly skilled at an instrument. Working with a Mac, you have to learn the technology just as you would learn to play an instrument or learn to paint with a brush. Then you have to forget it and then simply start creating and building. A pianist doesn’t spend time peeking inside the piano.
“And,” he adds, “as with jazz, you have structure with the Mac; once your structure is established, you can improvise creatively. You can give clients a rich language that allows them to express anything they need. It works for us brilliantly in managing this visual language process with large numbers of people spread over large geographical distances.”
Creative Polymath
As head of Research Studios, Inc., with offices in London, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin, Brody explores and reinterprets visual language for such well-known clients as adidas-Salomon, British Airways, Macromedia, Armani, Nike, Sony, the Dutch National Post Office and BBC. Research Studios also sporadically publishes “Fuse,” the award-winning interactive magazine that highlights creative possibilities of digital typography.
Much of Brody’s work is deliberately ambiguous. “I see my role,” he says, “partly as a catalyst for thought and for questioning. A lot of our work is an open-ended statement which often is not completed until the person who looks at it has reached his or her own conclusion.”
You can get an idea of the scale and nature of Brody’s thinking if you stroll inside the vast, 15,000 square-foot space of Tribeca Issey Miyake in New York. Miyake, fashion designer and textile genius, and architect Frank Gehry created an ever-evolving space that showcases artists in every field, including fashion, fine art, furniture design and murals. Miyake commissioned Brody to create the store’s branding and art direction as well as a catalog for the boutique. In the same way that the shop experiments with shape, material and technology, Brody’s catalog experiments with pattern, type and art. He describes the work as “a scrapbook of inspiration and cross-pollination.”
