Neville Brody:
Inventing a Graphic Language
Influenced by early 20th century avant-garde design, American album covers and the work of Russian constructivists El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, Brody began exploring new directions for graphic design in 1981 as art director for “The Face.” For this brash lifestyle magazine with its roots in the punk movement, Brody used noisy graphics and challenged conventional thinking about the form and function of typography by distorting letterforms, mixing fonts and making generous use of icons.
“Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries. It is like a clay sculpture that is always being twisted into new shapes without ever being fired.”
— Neville Brody
With the first Macs, Brody began to set new precedents in both design and typography. With the Macs, he told “Print: American Graphic Design Magazine” in 1999, he had the “opportunity to democratize the fiefdom of typographic design. Finally, we could…explore ideas that challenged our fundamental notions of what typographic language should be.”
Brody began to design his own typefaces — Insigina, Arcadia and Typeface Six are three of his most popular. They, and others, appear on everything from advertising to album and magazine covers, fashion magazine spreads and covers for rock biographies. “Blur is probably one of my favorite typefaces,” Brody says, “because it has to do with our experience in the information society today that I managed to translate into a process font. It was in the right place at the right time and became very popular, because it expressed an idea successfully and people understood the idea.”
One Mac, Any Medium
“The single major difference the Mac has made,” Brody observes “is that, from one source, we can create a language that can be used in any medium. We’ll produce a core identity and language that can then be distributed in print, web, electronic environmental design, packaging — everything — from one computer. The Mac is a means of broadcasting via the web. Via pdfs, we might send files to a printer in Japan. Of course, it’s a receiver as well. I often listen to the radio, a live stream on broadband.
“Our process is to try and use the computer in a very human, organic way, so that there’s a lot of sharing of culture as well as the practical stuff.”
“The Mac has also allowed us to work as one network,” Brody adds, “with different skill sets in different studios. The facility in Paris is largely geared toward packaging. London does most of the branding, and ‘Fuse’ comes out of London. And the San Francisco office is almost all motion graphics for film, TV and web. So we can have different skill sets in different places, and projects are often shared between two or more studios. We can not only share ideas, but we can have idea contributions from people working in very different kinds of cultures. Our process is to try and use the computer in a very human, organic way, so that there’s a lot of sharing of culture as well as the practical stuff.
“And the Mac means we can work economically, which is amazing. We don’t have to have 20 people in one place. It’s enabled us to have an extremely modular setup.”
