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Neville Brody by Clarance Sommerlad for Typography2
1 career in fine art, however he felt the school was too conservative, and turned to graphic design instead. He spent three years at the London College of Printing, but his work continued to be met with unfavourable criticism - mostly due to the college’s practice of traditional methods (Design Is History, n.d.). At one point he was almost expelled for his postage stamp design featuring the queen’s head sideways.
Brody hated college, but felt it necessary to his development as a designer. This criticism did not deter Brody, rather, it fueled him: “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,” (Billy Blue, 2016). Brody did not want to go to college, but “wanted to communicate to as many people
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Neville Brody (born London, 1957) has a very expansive portfolio, ranging from his beginnings as a design student under various colleges in the 1970’s; to the formation of Research Studios (now Brody Associates) in 1994. He has also designed over 20 typefaces and is a founding member of Fontworks - a London type foundry. Brody originally started his
4 as possible, but also to make a popular form of art that was more personal and less manipulative,” he had to find out more about how the process worked, and he felt the only way to do that was to “go to college and learn it”.
Why can’t you take a painterly approach within a printed medium? Brody took what he learned, combined it with his own internal style (“why be inhibited by the edges of the page?”), and transformed the way in which designers and readers approach typography and layout. He became an art director for The Face magazine (1980-1993) and set trends around the design world
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- the magazine became known as a “fashion bible”. Brody had just wanted to make readers look twice at the page, his fine art roots showing in his question: why can’t you take a painterly approach within a printed medium?
For a brief three years (1987-90) Brody avoided creating anything too exotic as he felt his work was being ripped off. He designed mostly minimalistic nondecorative typefaces for 80’s magazine Arena during this time. Also under his design belt are works for independent record companies such as Fetish, major
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contributions to the FUSE publication, contributions to other 80’s magazines, and the radical redesign of Britain’s two leading conservative newspapers: The Guardian and The Observer.
Why be inhibited by the edges of the page? Finally, and in summary, Brody was an avid user of the computer as a design tool during its developmental stages. Fittingly, he learned these computer skills while playing Crystal Quest - instead of working.
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