Neville Brody

4 Pages 977 Words

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 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 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 Queen’s 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. Brody’s attitude on computers has changed a lot since he first starte...